It's a damn shame the democrats in congress....

[TwixVoy]

It's a damn shame the democrats in congress didn't frame health care reform as follows:

"Everyone pays $100-250/month for health care. Your kids are included free of charge. No deductables. No co-pays. No lifetime limits. No sending in paperwork to get reimbursed. No more health insurance company to deal with. No worrying about out of network coverage. Simple, easy, done."

If it takes 1000+ pages of legislation to make it happen - so be it. But make it SIMPLE for the masses to understand. One long sound bite as simple as the above. Repeat it every time you get on the talk shows. Buy air time on the radio. Get the message out.

If the health insurance corporations were killed off it could literally be affordable with a mandate that every individual pays anywhere from $100-250 a month.

The masses who are currently paying THOUSANDS could easily get behind such a plan.

Instead we got a cluster fuck meant to protect the insurance corporations with no real message to the public about HOW they would benefit.

[provis99]

1. problem is, lots of people get their insurance through work

I'll bet most of them think: Well, I've already got insurance, so why are we fiddling around with it?

You've got to first tell these people that their insurance is crap, and the insurance companies are out to rip them off if they ever have to actually use the insurance.

[Ozymanithrax]

2. Not enough money

There are 114,825,428 households in the U.S. So, if you multiply that by your max, $250.00 and multiple that by 12 (1 year) you get $344,476,284,000. Medicare, alone, cost 470 billion, and that only covers about 48 million people. You can not even cover Medicare, which is the most efficient plan in use in the U.S. today, for 344.5 billion dollars. And Medicare has deductibles galore.

If you did that with every man woman and child (310 million) you would get 930,000,000,000. Since Medicare costs 470 billion a year, and you would need to cover about 5 times as many people, that still would not be enough. To cover everyone at the efficiencies achieved by Medicare, you would need about 2.4 trillion dollars.

Your plan will not work. It will not provide nearly enough money.

[w4rma]

3. Subsidize the rest of it from the Income Tax (nt)

[Ozymanithrax]

4. So you would then add a hefty increase in income tax.

Would this be a regressive Tax covered equally by everyone. Would you raise taxes on say the top 10%. Keep in mind, you must raise 2.4 trillion dollars.

We need universal health care, but we should all be aware that it isn't cheap.

Actaully, in 2008, the U.S. had a total expenditures 2.3 trillion at about $7,681 per resident. A single payer system would probably see real savings. The U.S. pays about 16% of its GDP for health care, France covers everyone for about 11% of its GDP (For 2008). So shave a quarter off the top. But that is still a lot of money.

Would you be willing to pay another 5,000 a year in taxes for health care for all. I would, but my wife and I already buy health Insurance and would not see that much greater expenditure. It would be more than that, because the poor would have to be subsidized, which is done for many with medicaid.

[w4rma]

14. Eliminating the capital gains tax and making it part of the income tax, instead, would do it. (nt)

[Ozymanithrax]

15. Capital Gains, now that would be regressive...

putting 2.4 trillion on the back of working people.

[sabrina 1]

5. End the wars and cut the Pentagon budget in half and we

could we could afford to save lives instead spending billions on killing people.

It's bs to say this country cannot afford to have a National Healthcare system. Every other industrialized country does it. It is a question of priorities. We seem to have endless amounts of money for the war machine. When have you heard anyone say 'we can't afford the trillions of dollars we spend on the war machine'?

And if we stopped giving welfare to Wall St. along with cutting the Pentagon Budget, and got people back to work so they could afford to pay into a National HC program, we could probably provide HC for the entire planet.

Maybe the numbers in the OP won't cover it. But since most people are paying anywhere from $4,000 to $12,000 a year for private insurance, and one third of that doesn't go to HC, but to overhead, profits for the middlemen, if we eliminated them and had a pro-rata system where people payed even half of what they are paying now, we would have more money to cover more people. Add to those savings, the other cuts I mentioned above, and we would have a surplus and we would still have more than enough to cover our defense expenses.

[Ozymanithrax]

16. The entire Pentagon budget for 2009 was 515.4 billion...

That includes the cost of the wars. 255 billion still won't put a dent in the cost of health care.

[sabrina 1]

19. Those numbers are not accurate.

Here's a more accuraate accounting of what is spent on the MIC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

For the 2010 fiscal year, the president's base budget of the Department of Defense rose to $533.8 billion. Adding spending on "overseas contingency operations" brings the sum to $663.8 billion.<1><2>

When the budget was signed into law on October 28, 2009 the final size of the Department of Defense's budget was $680 billion, $16 billion more than Obama had requested. <3><4> Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff expected an additional supplemental spending bill, possibly in the range of $40–50 billion, by the Spring of 2010 in order to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. <5>Defense-related expenditures outside of the Department of Defense constitute between $216 billion and $361 billion in additional spending, bringing the total for defense spending to between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion in fiscal year 2010.

Emergency and supplemental spending

The recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were largely funded through supplementary spending bills outside the Federal Budget, so they are not included in the military budget figures listed below.<7> In addition, the Pentagon has access to black budget military spending for special programs which is not listed as Federal spending and is not included in published military spending figures. Starting in the fiscal year 2010 budget however, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are categorized as "Overseas Contingency Operations" and included in the budget.

By the end of 2008, the U.S. had spent approximately $900 billion in direct costs on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Indirect costs such as interest on the additional debt and incremental costs of caring for the more than 33,000 wounded borne by the Veterans Administration are additional. Some experts estimate these indirect costs will eventually exceed the direct costs.

We spend more on our military budget than the rest of the world combined:

The 2009 U.S. military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world's defense spending combined and is over nine times larger than the military budget of China (compared at the nominal US dollar / Renminbi rate, not the PPP rate). The United States and its close allies are responsible for two-thirds to three-quarters of the world's military spending (of which, in turn, the U.S. is responsible for the majority)<26>

Think about that:

.... the Pentagon has access to black budget military spending for special programs which is not listed as Federal spending and is not included in published military spending figures.

No oversight, we don't even know what is in that 'black budget'.

And much of that money is wasted by corruption, over-charging by defense contractors, bribing bad guys, as in Iraq eg to 'get them on our side'.

Very little of it goes to the troops compared to what is spent on contractors and mercenaries.

Trillions are missing also from the Pentagon budget and no one seems to know how much or where it went, or more correctly, a lot of people don't want it investigaste so that we can find out where it went:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml

$2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million.

"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on," said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.

Minnery, a former Marine turned whistle-blower, is risking his job by speaking out for the first time about the millions he noticed were missing from one defense agency's balance sheets. Minnery tried to follow the money trail, even crisscrossing the country looking for records.

"The director looked at me and said 'Why do you care about this stuff?' It took me aback, you know? My supervisor asking me why I care about doing a good job," said Minnery.

He was reassigned and says officials then covered up the problem by just writing it off.

The exact amount of money being wasted on the wars and on weapons is probably never going to be known, but even if the waste were dealt with, we would have more to spend on a decent healthcare system.

Other countries have priorities, the most important of which is the health of their own citizens. That is why they can afford to take care of them, while the richest country in the world says 'No, we can't! Sorry, no one really believes that. Just saving the waste from the military budget and cutting out the middle guys' 30% for profit, would be a start.

[ChicagoSuz219]

6. Take t;he cap off FICA. n/t

[Ozymanithrax]

17. That is a good idea, except that FICA is social security not Health Care...

Unless you count Health Care as part of Social Security (a logical conclusion but is has not be written that way) I don't think you can do that.

[ChicagoSuz219]

20. When I first...

...started receiving Disability (from Social Security) they would deduct $96 a month for Medicare. They must be connected somehow...

[Lorien]

8. Pay the same as every other country industrialized Nation for drugs and services

and outlaw drug advertising-that alone would cut Big Pharma's costs in half. Simple blood tests that cost $80.00 two years ago now cost over $300.00; negotiate the prices back down to a reasonable level. Invest more in preventative care. There's no reason in the world that we should rank #37 in health care.

[Ozymanithrax]

18. Outlaw drug advertising would end one major anoyance to me.

But corporations now have freedom of speach. At this point in history, I'm not sure we can do that.

But you do touch on the means used in foreign countries that use both socialize health care and mandates, limiting costs, and therefore profits, of health care companies. Japan, for instance, limits the number of expensive procdrues like Cat scans and X-rays. Very good.

[eridani]

13. It would be if there were also a payroll tax on businesses n/t

[ChicagoSuz219]

7. This is strange...

I'm doing a focus group on Tuesday. The pre-screening questions had to do with healthcare, taxes, etc.

They asked if I would be willing to read a pamphlet & give my take on it. I bet it's the Idiot's Guide to HCR or something like that...

[daleanime]

9. They didn't make it sound easy....

because they don't want it to be easy.:banghead:

[girl gone mad]

10. It isn't a shame. It was by design. n/t

[bbgrunt]

11. ...ahhhh, but they don't want to understand that it

is the way it is by design.....they are trying to hold on to anything they think is solid while their world is being shredded and shaken to the core. I know the feeling, but am no longer disillusioned.

[upi402]

12. except; they never wanted to make it happen

it used to be "aw, too bad we need a super majority"
we pushed for reconciliation, they have the votes for PO - and it's 'off the table'.