“A better template to examine would be Russia. Their state run system is so bad that people barter with doctors for examinations and treatments.”

Why? Is the only correlation to the situation here the geographic and population size? Or does the fact it sucks (as our health care sucks) make the appropriate comparison?

“This means federal programs should not promote or support unhealthy behaviors….”

Does this strike anyone here as far too vague? This could mean anything from smoking (bad, but legal) to not wearing a helmet when riding a motorcycle to having unprotected sex to doing drugs (illegal and completely right for tax payers to not support, of course) to ANYthing that “the Feds” decide is too unhealthy to ’support’.

And what does that mean, anyway? “Not support” how? Denying coverage if you take a spill while hang-gliding because it’s an unhealthy risk? Not covering your chemo if you have cancer if you’re a smoker?

I think we’d need to replace “unhealthy” with “illegal”. I mean, we’re talking about health insurance here - so I don’t understand what exactly they mean by “Federal programs should not support….”

I’d also demand that there be increases in the new “refundable credit” tied to future increases in inflation. And finally, I’m not sure what “refundable credit” means… if it means you purchase a plan now and get a tax break on April 12th, that won’t do a lot of good for working people who are living paycheck to paycheck as it is.

But still, this is a very promising idea and I’d like to see it explored more in depth by both sides (only by listening to the left and the right can you come to some sort of truth in the middle).

Either way you win but we all benefit if the costs of such insurance can be held down by spreading the risk.

I would think conservatives would decry this as socialism and would not support it.

Spreading risk is done on Wall Street all the time. Why do you think they call them “Hedge Funds?” Seriously, the whole idea of mutual funds is to spread the risk of loss by purchasing many stocks. Some will go up, some down but you hope more go up so that the MF earns money.

Or were you being sarcastic?

ed.

Nick - the GOP plan has a requirement for the states to set up “uninsurable pools” where people like you will be able to purchase insurance at the same price as everybody else because the risk will be spread out among all insurers doing business in your state. Not a perfect solution (my guess is that actuarials will be very busy figuring out just who might be “uninsurable”) but I think it will be better than Obama’s idea which will probably involve “Commissions” that will force insurance companies to take on people with pre-existing conditions and probably pay a larger subsidy for it. Either way you win but we all benefit if the costs of such insurance can be held down by spreading the risk.

ed.

Unfortunately, it does nothing to fix the other big problems in American health care, one of which is the sanity sapping act of dealing with the health insurance companies to actually pay for ones medical treatment. Frankly, if the members of congress had to deal with Oxford and Blue Cross et al. rather than their “no questions asked” government issued insurance, there would have been a successful bi-partisan creation of a single-payer system years ago!
Oops…forgot to say great post! Looking forward to your next one.

Unfortunately, it does nothing to fix the other big problems in American health care, one of which is the sanity sapping act of dealing with the health insurance companies to actually pay for ones medical treatment. Frankly, if the members of congress had to deal with Oxford and Blue Cross et al. rather than their “no questions asked” government issued insurance, there would have been a successful bi-partisan creation of a single-payer system years ago!

The problem here is one of scale, I think. Canada has fewer residents than California. A similar point could be made of European countries (who seem to have bigger problems than Canada in maintaining an adequate national health care system) whose populations are from 3 to 10 times smaller than the US.

A better template to examine would be Russia. Their state run system is so bad that people barter with doctors for examinations and treatments.

I’m very glad you like your health care system in Canada and that it is performing as advertised. I’m just not sure Obamacare would do the same here. You might note that I say the family stipend offered in the GOP plan is too low and that the temptation for insurance companies to game the system at the state level exchanges means that there would have to be close federal oversight to prevent price fixing and other dodges. The market won’t cure all that is wrong with the health care crisis in America. But some of the solutions offered by the GOP are a damn sight better than the top down mandated solutions offered by Obama.

ed.

The only reason to go is for the cheap prices DESPITE the customer service, not in addition to it.

LOL. Amen. Not to mention that once all the local businesses shut down because they couldn’t compete, it was literally the ONLY place to buy stuff. Either you buy stuff you need at Wal-Mart and like it, or, well, you buy stuff you need at Wal-Mart and don’t like it.