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A Plea to the New Republican Majority
September 22, 2010 | 19 comments
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Another Federal Giveaway to Unions
September 2, 2010 | 2 comments
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Federal Rate Review?
March 4, 2010 | 19 comments
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Redistricting
January 25, 2010 | 5 comments
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They Still Don’t Get It
January 17, 2010 | 20 comments
The Spectacle Blog
Congress is groping for ways to finance this thing and every day they come up with a swell new idea. One day it is a tax on soda pop, the next day it is botox, next a VAT tax on everyone, and then a “surtax on the rich,” and so on.
They don’t want to limit the exclusion for high cost insurance coverage because Labor likes that high-cost insurance coverage. Politico reports that, “White House officials are embracing a plan to tax “gold-plated, Cadillac” insurance policies, giving momentum to an idea that is receiving bipartisan consideration on Capitol Hill.”
This is the nifty new idea Sen. John Kerrey came up with – instead of making insurance coverage taxable income for the people who get it, we’ll tax the insurance company itself if they sell a “gold-plated health plan.”
Apparently, no one stops to think, “let’s see now, if we tax the insurance company, where will it get the money to pay it? Oh, by raising the cost of the coverage to the employer! But if the employer pays more for the coverage where will it get the money from? Oh, by lowering workers’ wages! So, who ends up paying for it after all this smoke and mirrors? Who else? The very same workers we were trying to help.”
View all comments (9) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Greg Scandlen
http://spectator.org/blog/2009/08/04/paying-for-obamas-health-refor
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Julie| 8.4.09 @ 12:05PM
I’m a Vietnam era veteran. I joined the military because I love my country. I traveled 47 of 50 states and saw this country’s beauty. Now I’m just plain embarrassed.
People in the world look to the U.S. for hope, leadership, decency and solutions for problems. The politicians, the Republicans and Blue Dog Dems, banks and corporate America, will not offer any of these things to the American people, let alone the world. The world watches the political and corporate disarray in the U.S. on TV and reads about it in their papers and most likely, the world is laughing. The far right is making a laughing stock out of the United States.
This country has come so far, yet there are those who will not let it grow and become a better place. The groups of people who are causing disruption in our government should sit back and take a look at what our founding fathers gave us…a United country.
Give Americans back the hope, leadership, decency and solutions that were promised to us. Stop embarrassing yourselves and the American people.
Julie Paulsen
Sioux City, IA
Tim| 8.4.09 @ 12:12PM
Prices for private insurance go up, they figure support for Gubmint goes up. Nothing dumb about it.
Bill Pearce| 8.4.09 @ 1:17PM
To: Old Texican
I fear you are too late by decades. What is now considered the political process has been corrupted by the corpocracy since the 1970's. The end started quickly after the corporations became the tax collectors for the federal government. Not only did the corporations became part of the government through the IRS, the corporations gained an understated control of the federal government by controlling the federal income. Remember, Who ever pays the piper calls the tune. The corporation corpocracy has only abused the conservative movement as cover for their interests. The last Bush administration was a example of the corpocracy using the conservatives as cover. One day they will drop the political cover as being a unnecessary expense.
Old Texican| 8.4.09 @ 1:39PM
Hi Bill
Thank you, but we have enough conspiracy nuts already.
We "corporate brass"...have only one motivation.
.......ALL THE PROFIT THE MARKET WILL BEAR!
(That is defined as WE free marketers doing our thing for our shareholders.)
Sorta' like a baseball player earning millions...'cause he is the best.
Sorta' like OPRAH super woman making millions crying over losers.
I forgive you for your stupid post, Bill. The post right before yours was deleted...it was not me, but an Obama paid troll.
Best regards
Steven Bavaria| 8.4.09 @ 2:50PM
Healthcare: Let’s Fix the Real Scandal!
Uninsured people suffer incredible price-gouging by the medical industry, and are routinely charged anywhere from twice as much, to 10 or 12 times as much, for the same services as people covered by insurance. That is the real scandal in health care, and the one we should fix first. Most of us lucky enough to have insurance never bother to ask the cost of our medical services, as long as the doctor accepts our insurance. But if you read your insurance statements, you see the gap between the “sticker price” and the price the insurer pays is huge. In our family’s experience, it is typically 2 or 3 times for doctors’ services, and as much as 10 or 12 times for hospital and lab charges.
It is this huge mark-up on medical bills that is killing the uninsured, much more than the lack of coverage per se. A “quick fix” that Democrats and Republicans should all be able to agree on would be to pass a “Most-Favored-Patient” Act (similar to the most-favored-nation concept in international trade law that guarantees each nation the benefits of tariff concessions granted to other nations) to require health care providers to charge all their patients no more than the lowest price they charge other patients. You could even allow medical providers to gross up prices by some reasonable percentage – 120% perhaps – if you wanted to give large insurers a reasonable “volume discount” that they may feel entitled to.
The impact of this would be huge. First of all, it would remove the primary disadvantage of being uninsured, and be a big win for the lower-income working class, who make up most of the uninsured. It would also introduce transparency and cost-competitiveness to the healthcare industry, since healthcare providers would have to post prices. This would allow all healthcare consumers – insured as well as uninsured – to become smarter and more cost-conscious about how our healthcare dollars are being spent, whether the money is coming directly from our own pockets or from our insurer.
Once we correct the huge inequity that now exists for the uninsured, and introduce price transparency and cost-consciousness across the board, then even if we do move on to a more comprehensive national system it will probably have a smaller price tag because many of the grosser inefficiencies will have already been squeezed out of our current system.
Bill Pearce| 8.4.09 @ 4:02PM
To: Old Texican, “NEW” OLD TEXICAN, or Old Texican “new and improved with Chemical X”
You are not paranoid if you are under fire and taking hits. Nor are you a conspiracy nut when you have watched a lawyer openly boasting about how well he was manipulating the government. Old Tex, What did you think the Corporate Lawyers as a class were doing all these decades. Also, Thank you for your forgiveness, but you did not rebut my main point.
For further reading see Fred Reed's article ( Election Fraud ) in the American Conservative magazine.
Fred Reed makes a much broader point, but from a electoral viewpoint.
T0: All Others
The above posts does not make any sense until you realize I was reacting to a post no longer present.
To sum up , a person masquerading as [ Old Texican ] posted a variation of the liberal theory of Corporate Social Darwinism as the American Republic transitions to the American Empire.
The real [ Old Texican ] objected to the liberal impostor and had the relevant posts removed by the TAS web-master. My first post was a reaction to that post.