Healthcare going forward

[rareboy]

A major problem is that in the US, relatively few pay significant taxes. The cost of health insurance will be born by less than half of the people. As it is, many live on welfare generation after generation, and more are coming in and going on welfare from day one. Others live on crime, while others live in the underground economy and pay no income tax. Once a system is in place, it will be adjusted year after year to shift the burden to fewer and fewer people as an inducement to voters, and as a means of redistributing income.

Or maybe corporate America could just start paying a living wage that would result in millions more people actually paying income tax instead of working two jobs for bare minimum wage.

 

[KaraBulut]

Like billionaire Donald J. Trump who doesn't pay any taxes at all?

You let stand an incorrect statement- that "few pay significant taxes". That's not a true statement.

About 40% of the American public doesn't make enough to pay income taxes. Note that very important "income" before the word "taxes".

Of the 40% who do not pay taxes, about 1/4 of those are people who are retired and are not working.

The other 60% are working and they pay Medicare, SSDI, property and local sales taxes. This includes students, part-time workers and other people who are working but who are below the gross income that qualifies to pay income taxes.

Only about 7.9 percent of households are not paying any federal taxes at all. That's usually because they're either unemployed or on disability or students or are very poor.

Source.

Maybe so, but The ACA was passed at the very last possible moment - wasn't it passed, I think, on Christmas Eve 2010? That was during the very last gasp of Democratic control of both houses of Congress, because a new Republican congress had just been elected.

You are correct. Ted Kennedy (D) had died. Olympia Snow (R) announced that she would not support the bill. Scott Brown (R) was elected to replace Ted Kennedy, so the Democrats would not have had the needed votes to pass the bill, so it was pushed to a vote before the recess and no Republican Senators voted for it.

It was a stupid move. Even though the basics of the ACA were written long before Obama was elected and even though it was reviewed in committee for nearly a year, the final bill that was passed was not read by most of the people who voted for it.

It allowed the opposition groups (largely funded by a small number of billionaires) to fund a media blitz that passed on falsehoods (remember "death panels"?) about the legislation. It led to the rise of the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus. It cost the Democrats House seats in the 2010 election at the National level. It was the beginning of major Democratic losses at the State level.

If past is prologue, expect the 2010 election to be a harbinger for the 2018 election... only this time, it will be the AHCA (which will never get through the Senate in the form passed by the House).

 

[Benvolio]

You let stand an incorrect statement- that "few pay significant taxes". That's not a true statement.

About 40% of the American public doesn't make enough to pay income taxes. Note that very important "income" before the word "taxes".

Of the 40% who do not pay taxes, about 1/4 of those are people who are retired and are not working.

The other 60% are working and they pay Medicare, SSDI, property and local sales taxes. This includes students, part-time workers and other people who are working but who are below the gross income that qualifies to pay income taxes.


Source.


You are correct. Ted Kennedy (D) had died. Olympia Snow (R) announced that she would not support the bill. Scott Brown (R) was elected to replace Ted Kennedy, so the Democrats would not have had the needed votes to pass the bill, so it was pushed to a vote before the recess and no Republican Senators voted for it.

It was a stupid move. Even though the basics of the ACA were written long before Obama was elected and even though it was reviewed in committee for nearly a year, the final bill that was passed was not read by most of the people who voted for it.

It allowed the opposition groups (largely funded by a small number of billionaires) to fund a media blitz that passed on falsehoods (remember "death panels"?) about the legislation. It led to the rise of the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus. It cost the Democrats House seats in the 2010 election at the National level. It was the beginning of major Democratic losses at the State level. The top 40%
Pay 106% of fed income tax.

If past is prologue, expect the 2010 election to be a harbinger for the 2018 election... only this time, it will be the AHCA (which will never get through the Senate in the form passed by the House).

Social security and Medicare deductions are not really taxes, but a savings program for the individuals eventual use. The deductions do not go to support the government but are a separate fund, although borrowed by the government. Many do not pay property taxes and such are in any event state taxes as are sales taxes. So it is true that many do do pay significant taxes to support the health care system. Whether they have enough income is debatable. Politicians choose the income level to be taxed, and are motivated largely by pandering to voters an engaging in class warfare. The top 40% pay 106% of personal income taxes even as they are demonized for not paying their "share". And those same people will be forced to pay any federal subsidy of health care and any socialized medicine scheme.

 

[patrickj]

A major problem is that in the US, relatively few pay significant taxes. The cost of health insurance will be born by less than half of the people. As it is, many live on welfare generation after generation, and more are coming in and going on welfare from day one. Others live on crime, while others live in the underground economy and pay no income tax. Once a system is in place, it will be adjusted year after year to shift the burden to fewer and fewer people as an inducement to voters, and as a means of redistributing income.

Tax fairness is a separate issue that I won't go into but "welfare" is one of those issues like "crime" (Also at record lows.) where the public perception in 2017 is nearly the polar opposite of the reality. For example, the percentage of Americans on welfare today is not higher than in the past. It is at nearly record lows. Welfare roles have been cut nearly in half in just the last 20-25 years. Not to mention that the US welfare system, compared to the other 35 (OECD) wealthy democracies, is the most threadbare. Indeed, out of all of those countries only one has no system of mandatory universal healthcare....the USA. South Korean, New Zealander, Swedish, Belgian, Australian, Taiwanese, etc., etc., you have guaranteed health care. We are the one and only, odd man out. We only have a couple of actual "welfare" programs (TANF & SNAP), that make up 90+% of welfare spending, and the percentage of American families that are recipients of it, is only about -1.8% of the population (Adults & children combined-TANF.), and about another 9-11% use food stamps (SNAP), and most of those are employed-virtually all, single mothers with children. The US poverty rate btw, is about 11% which corresponds almost exactly.

https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/images-reports/welfare-indicators-and-risk-factors/figind3a.png
Percentage of Americans on TANF+ other welfare programs, excluding food stamps.

What gets erroneously counted in so many "outrage porn" type news stories about welfare, are the growing number of recipients of Social Security, Medicare, etc. benefits. These are NOT welfare, however. When a grandfather receives their SS retirement or my aunt makes use of her Medicare benis to pay for home-health care, they are NOT getting a handout from "Uncle Sam". They paid for those benefits with a lifetime of payroll taxes which everybody pays into from the 17 year old working part time a McDonald’s, to the Wall Street corporate lawyer with a yacht. What has caused those rates to rise is not laziness, not liberalism, nothing sinister. There is one, central factor......aging. The median age of the USA is roughly double what it was when I was born. It is now close to 40 years old, meaning, in the world's third most populous country, about 165 million people are now over the age of 40. Literally, tens of millions. About 58 million over the age of 65 as of 2017. That's larger than 88% of the total population of every country on earth. Social Sec., Medicare, disability rates, are naturally going to climb given that fact.

 

[rareboy]

Social security and Medicare deductions are not really taxes, but a savings program for the individuals eventual use. The deductions do not go to support the government but are a separate fund, although borrowed by the government. Many do not pay property taxes and such are in any event state taxes as are sales taxes. So it is true that many do do pay significant taxes to support the health care system. Whether they have enough income is debatable. Politicians choose the income level to be taxed, and are motivated largely by pandering to voters an engaging in class warfare. The top 40% pay 106% of personal income taxes even as they are demonized for not paying their "share". And those same people will be forced to pay any federal subsidy of health care and any socialized medicine scheme.

Under Trump's new 'Tax Plan' he would have paid only 3.5% of his income in taxes for the year we have records for...or about 5.2 million on an income of 152 million dollars.

Don't whine about fairness for the wealthy who have had the tax codes written to favour their interests and to avoid paying a fair share of taxes.

None of us are that stupid.

And given that even the idea of TrumpCo. is so sickening for more than half the country, he should have to shoulder the burden for millions of people having to manage this pre-existing condition.

 

[Kulindahr]

But we all are already required to labour for others. We must pay our taxes or face prosecution. We do so for the common good and specifically to fulfil our obligation to the rights of others. The State, (through taxes which we must labour to pay, and through it's right to regulate, which we must labour to fulfill), keeps us safe from enemies abroad and crime at home. They make sure that airlines, hospitals, coal mines, food manufacturers are regulated in order to protect the rights of people to health and safety. They already tax for health care for the elderly and the poor. Man everywhere and always, has lived in natural commonwealth. Even before there was a concept of a State, man in his tribes, clans, etc., understood that all within the tribe had a right to enough food, health care, and justice. Hence, natural rights and natural law.

I realize we started to get off on a slightly different issue but I tried to bring the two together here.

First error: the state has no rights; rights belong to individuals. The state can have authority, which comes by being delegated by the people.

But nothing that the state does in requiring labor of us us due to any right of others; it all has to do with our obligations as part of a people.

There are no rights to "enough food, health care" -- those are obligations of the whole to the individual, but the individual has no right to them. Confusing these two is what results in kids thinking that sharing means they can just take someone else's stuff and use it without permission. The concept of a "right" which requires things from others generates a sense of entitlement which in turn leads to slavery and theft.

Rights arise from self-ownership, and thus cannot demand things of others because that violates their self-ownership. But belonging to a people results in two things: an implicit contract to honor the rights of others in return for them honoring our rights, and an obligation to act in the interest of the members of that people in order that we may expect them to act in our interests. The two have to be in balance; lack of balance in either direction is detrimental to liberty, which is to say it is detrimental to self-ownership: In the case of emphasizing only rights, the result is a cruel society where everyone competes to advance their own interests with no concern for the interests of others; in the case of emphasizing only obligations, the result is a desultory society where few if any put out much more effort than is absolutely needed to survive -- another cruel form of society. The two can be described in terms of color; the first is red, as in "red of tooth and claw", while the other is gray, a dismal color.

In order to keep the proper balance, we first have to keep straight what are rights and what are obligations. I return to the example of kids and sharing: in college, I observed an astounding number of people who felt perfectly free to walk into someone else's room and walk off with things, on the grounds that they had a right to use those things because the other person was supposed to share. That results from a failure to distinguish between rights and obligations: a right is something the individual can exercise without consultation or assistance from someone else, while an obligation is something the individual ought/must do with both consultation and assistance from others.

So I have a right to free speech; only I can choose my words and put my mouth to work (conversely, anything with no mouth nor mind behind it to choose words can have free speech because it fails in having speech at all). I have a right to believe as I wish in religion or philosophy, because only I command my mind and choose my beliefs. And so on. But I have no right to health care, because I can't get it without requiring action from others.

In essence rights rest upon the individual as an island, isolated unto himself, while obligations rest on the individual as a part of the whole. The fact of the matter is that we are each both islands and part of the whole, and each is important not just for ourselves but for all the other selves who are members of the same people.

 

[Kulindahr]

A major problem is that in the US, relatively few pay significant taxes. The cost of health insurance will be born by less than half of the people. As it is, many live on welfare generation after generation, and more are coming in and going on welfare from day one. Others live on crime, while others live in the underground economy and pay no income tax. Once a system is in place, it will be adjusted year after year to shift the burden to fewer and fewer people as an inducement to voters, and as a means of redistributing income.

This is a good illustration of what I just expounded on: it sees individuals as islands. The result is a fractured society where -- to borrow a phrase from the Bible -- every man does what is right in his own eyes, and no one looks to the whole.

 

[rareboy]

^ Communist.



lol

 

[patrickj]

First error: the state has no rights; rights belong to individuals. The state can have authority, which comes by being delegated by the people.

But nothing that the state does in requiring labor of us us due to any right of others; it all has to do with our obligations as part of a people.

There are no rights to "enough food, health care" -- those are obligations of the whole to the individual, but the individual has no right to them. Confusing these two is what results in kids thinking that sharing means they can just take someone else's stuff and use it without permission. The concept of a "right" which requires things from others generates a sense of entitlement which in turn leads to slavery and theft.

Rights arise from self-ownership, and thus cannot demand things of others because that violates their self-ownership. But belonging to a people results in two things: an implicit contract to honor the rights of others in return for them honoring our rights, and an obligation to act in the interest of the members of that people in order that we may expect them to act in our interests. The two have to be in balance; lack of balance in either direction is detrimental to liberty, which is to say it is detrimental to self-ownership: In the case of emphasizing only rights, the result is a cruel society where everyone competes to advance their own interests with no concern for the interests of others; in the case of emphasizing only obligations, the result is a desultory society where few if any put out much more effort than is absolutely needed to survive -- another cruel form of society. The two can be described in terms of color; the first is red, as in "red of tooth and claw", while the other is gray, a dismal color.

In order to keep the proper balance, we first have to keep straight what are rights and what are obligations. I return to the example of kids and sharing: in college, I observed an astounding number of people who felt perfectly free to walk into someone else's room and walk off with things, on the grounds that they had a right to use those things because the other person was supposed to share. That results from a failure to distinguish between rights and obligations: a right is something the individual can exercise without consultation or assistance from someone else, while an obligation is something the individual ought/must do with both consultation and assistance from others.

So I have a right to free speech; only I can choose my words and put my mouth to work (conversely, anything with no mouth nor mind behind it to choose words can have free speech because it fails in having speech at all). I have a right to believe as I wish in religion or philosophy, because only I command my mind and choose my beliefs. And so on. But I have no right to health care, because I can't get it without requiring action from others.

In essence rights rest upon the individual as an island, isolated unto himself, while obligations rest on the individual as a part of the whole. The fact of the matter is that we are each both islands and part of the whole, and each is important not just for ourselves but for all the other selves who are members of the same people.

We will simply have to disagree. Yours is a more libertarian perspective and mine is a traditional conservative one. Some of it I feel is just semantics as well. You say the State has authority to tax and I would say yes, it has the authority because it has the right to tax. The State may give itself the authority to do lots of things that it has no right to, but it only has the right to do what is natural to it's obligations. For instance, it has the right to tax you within reason, (And so require you to labour to pay for it.) but it does NOT have the right to tax you into starvation, no matter how much authority it claims.

And as far as being obligated, that is where I think your argument fails. If one is obligated to do something, than the person who receives that benefit is not being given charity, for lack of a better word. Charity is what one voluntarily does out of love, kindness, sympathy. You are not required to do so. On the other hand, any obligation you have; to spouse, friends, your kids, your boss, the State, etc., is so, because the recipient has a right to receive it. Libertarian minded folks believe that individuals are sovereign entities; the State functioning mostly as arbitrator between those competing individual rights. Traditional conservatives do not. We certainly stress individual liberty, property, and restraint of government, but we believe that man is by nature, communal. Living in commonwealth with a definable 'common good' that the State's chief function is to ensure, defend, and uphold. Hence, care for the sick, the poor, the elderly, may have individual obligation and may be open to voluntary acts of charity, but the entire commonwealth of individuals, acting with the State's authority, have a true obligation to care for them and so those in need, are not receiving a gift of charity, but the addressing by the State of a basic human right, that they deserve.

I realize that we can never agree on this given our differing perspectives but it was nice to pleasantly exchange views.

 

[Kulindahr]

We will simply have to disagree. Yours is a more libertarian perspective and mine is a traditional conservative one. Some of it I feel is just semantics as well. You say the State has authority to tax and I would say yes, it has the authority because it has the right to tax. The State may give itself the authority to do lots of things that it has no right to, but it only has the right to do what is natural to it's obligations. For instance, it has the right to tax you within reason, (And so require you to labour to pay for it.) but it does NOT have the right to tax you into starvation, no matter how much authority it claims.

And as far as being obligated, that is where I think your argument fails. If one is obligated to do something, than the person who receives that benefit is not being given charity, for lack of a better word. Charity is what one voluntarily does out of love, kindness, sympathy. You are not required to do so. On the other hand, any obligation you have; to spouse, friends, your kids, your boss, the State, etc., is so, because the recipient has a right to receive it. Libertarian minded folks believe that individuals are sovereign entities; the State functioning mostly as arbitrator between those competing individual rights. Traditional conservatives do not. We certainly stress individual liberty, property, and restraint of government, but we believe that man is by nature, communal. Living in commonwealth with a definable 'common good' that the State's chief function is to ensure, defend, and uphold. Hence, care for the sick, the poor, the elderly, may have individual obligation and may be open to voluntary acts of charity, but the entire commonwealth of individuals, acting with the State's authority, have a true obligation to care for them and so those in need, are not receiving a gift of charity, but the addressing by the State of a basic human right, that they deserve.

I realize that we can never agree on this given our differing perspectives but it was nice to pleasantly exchange views.

The biggest problem with using rights in that fashion is it leads to sloppy thinking. The foundation of rights in the West has always been individual sovereignty, so rights rest in individuals alone. Thinkers rejected the idea that the state has rights because it implies that the state has some independent existence, which in turn means that it is not really a creation of those who are governed, that it does not derive every power or bit of power from the consent of the governed. Referring to things that do not come from individual sovereignty is a late development.

The one exception to this has been the idea of states' rights, but it was always understood that any lower jurisdiction can be spoken of having rights as over against a higher jurisdiction because the lower jurisdiction is held to be acting on behalf of the people in such a conflict, so "states' rights" is really the rights of the people of the states as defended against infringement from another state or from the federal government.

I like the term "commonwealth" because it expresses a truth about a society that psychopath capitalists prefer to ignore, namely that the wealth of a society is a product of synergy, of all the different elements of the society working together to result in wealth. There's a decent argument for the power of taxation that can be made from the phenomenon of synergy, namely that taxation represents a recovery of wealth generated by the working together of the whole, this to be utilized for the whole -- it is thus the "common wealth", the wealth that results from the synergy of the society.

BTW, the term commonwealth ought first of all mean that all real estate and resources within the entity's boundaries belongs to all equally. That would be a more rational approach than the current plutocratic property structure with its antagonistic relationship with the state, so that we speak of "private property" when it's known that the state actually owns it all -- otherwise it couldn't seize property for failure to pay taxes, or exercise eminent domain. If a society organized itself as a corporation of the whole, each citizen of a certain age (or having met certain requirements) having one share, so that the rent on all land that was paid into a common account, the result would be a very capitalistic socialism, because the revenue from land rent would be distributed equally to every citizen -- thus the basic and guaranteed income would truly represent the common wealth.

 

[cocksucker4use]

A major problem is that in the US, relatively few pay significant taxes. The cost of health insurance will be born by less than half of the people. As it is, many live on welfare generation after generation, and more are coming in and going on welfare from day one. Others live on crime, while others live in the underground economy and pay no income tax. Once a system is in place, it will be adjusted year after year to shift the burden to fewer and fewer people as an inducement to voters, and as a means of redistributing income.

No, the MAJOR problem in the United States is that relatively few make a significant income to warrant such taxes. But, not to worry, he GOP takes care of its own....donors. The health care act that left the House carries with it a cut in capital gains and other taxes. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/03/07/the_republican_health_care_plan_is_a_massive_tax_cut_for_the_rich.html I heard Warren Buffet say that he would have saved ~600K off of his $4M tax bill this year under the proposed plan for....health care?

 

[BigChicken]

That's also the way that I feel when I watch Tom Price tell full-on falsehoods on the Sunday shows.

Paul Ryan has gone from right-wing think tank darling to happy budget committee warrior to reluctant Speaker to reluctant Trump supporter to some amalgam of desperate-looking politician and former-altar-boy-who-is-dreadful-at-lying. It's been sad to watch.

None of them look particularly young. As they say, they've seen better days and they're so far back in the rear view mirror they can't even see them anymore.

 

[BigChicken]

This guy wins the internet today.

The republicans actually feel that way, but are too afraid of the voters to come out and say it.

 

[Kulindahr]

No, the MAJOR problem in the United States is that relatively few make a significant income to warrant such taxes. But, not to worry, he GOP takes care of its own....donors. The health care act that left the House carries with it a cut in capital gains and other taxes. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/03/07/the_republican_health_care_plan_is_a_massive_tax_cut_for_the_rich.html I heard Warren Buffet say that he would have saved ~600K off of his $4M tax bill this year under the proposed plan for....health care?

"Drain the swamp"... more like feed it.

 

[eastofeden]

The California Legislator is now working on a plan to cover ALL Californians with the Single Payer Option....

The plan would cost 400 billion a year...200 billion they are already paying so on the table is a 15% payroll tax...

There is a good chance it will pass I think.....

 

[Kulindahr]

^
California is doing a good job of destroying the GOP narrative about economics: they have probably the highest levels of regulations of any state, yet their economy is leading the country (and for that matter the world).

 

[DantheManFL]

Well, the Congressional Budget Office has release their report.

23 Million Fewer Americans Would Have Health Coverage Under Obamacare Repeal Plan, Budget Office Confirms

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gop-health-care-bill-congressional-budget-office_us_5924e896e4b00c8df29feb68?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

 

[rareboy]

Well that is a YUGE improvement over 24 million losing their coverage.

The mid-terms are coming.

 

[KaraBulut]

Well, the Congressional Budget Office has release their report.

The original report is here.

The majority of the budget deficit reduction is because Medicaid subsidies to the states are being slashed- basically taking away $834 billion over 10 years to lower taxes breaks of $664 billion to people who make over $250,000 per year:

 

[Kulindahr]

Well, the Congressional Budget Office has release their report. 23 Million Fewer Americans Would Have Health Coverage Under Obamacare Repeal Plan, Budget Office Confirms http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...896e4b00c8df29feb68?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

Well, those Americans are nobody. After all, Trump said he had a plan that would cover everybody, so anyone not covered must not be anybody, so they're just nobody.