I keep hearing that personal attacks mean you do not have a valid argument.
How is this different from the current system, outside of the fact that the poor people will now have to pay a premium that they cannot afford. If you charge a lower premium than is currently being charged, you will be losing money left and right.
Can you opt out of the premiums? Do the premiums that are charged differ based on how much you earn? You will have to create a huge bureau to oversee this, which will spend a ton of money on staffing and other things.
Further, consider that the federal government's General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates that for every $10 spent on Medicare, $1 is lost to errors, waste, and intentional fraud. A January 2003 GAO report also placed Medicaid on a list of government programs at "high risk" of fraud, waste, abuse or mismanagement.
Seeing as how in 2004, Medicare spent around 260 billion dollars to cover only 41 million people, that would mean that 26 billion dollars was wasted.
This means that for each person covered by Medicare, the government wastes around 630 dollars per person per year. In what Medicare wastes yearly, most of these people could pay more than half of their premiums.
Further, given the above statistics, (26 billion dollars a year is wasted) it would seem to me that the "bailout" cost is not a better price. Given that you will have to continue the funding of this year in and year out, as opposed to a 1 time bailout (that might actually make you money), I do not think it is a good comparison.
Medicare was enacted in 1965. This was 43 years ago. So, if current trends continue and are accurate, in the next 43 years of Medicare existence, we can expect to spend $10,750,000,000,000 and waste and astonishing $1,118,0000,000,000.
Our $700,000,000,000 rescue package pails to the money that will just be wasted by Medicare.
Many companies do not offer benefits to people just starting out. Many companies certainly do not give benefits to people working at minimum wage. How does cutting the minimum wage slightly and basically nationalizing healthcare fix anything you are advocating?
It is not lobbyists that set healthcare costs.
In fairness we gave the rescue money to financial wings of companies and to banks. Yes AIG gives insurance, but it was not AIG insurance wing that caused their problems, it was their financial group.
Speaking of regulation in the banking industry, did anyone else notice that AIG had to ask the government for permission to loan its financial branch money from one of its profitable branches. That does not make much sense to me. It would seem with no regulation they simply could have just done so.
The credit market has improved, and that is the first step. Panic selling around the globe is still in full swing, but the bailout worked to unfreeze credit markets (its intended goal) and that is the first step to a turnaround.
No, trickle up is not the remedy.
