healthcare Mandate Penalty Could Lead to Prison

Originally posted by PinkFloyd
That is incidental---suppose I don't want insurance because it's against my religion? Or because I think I'm Superman and don't need it? Or on general principles? The point is one should NOT be forced to spend THEIR money on something THEY do not want.

Suppose I want to kill you because my religion says so. Well, that's tough luck, because murder is illegal. What general principles would make one not want health care? The only valid reason I can think of is that's it's too expensive and that is easily fixed by subsidizing insurance for people with low incomes. When you don't have insurance, you can still go to the ER even if you cannot afford care. In essence, you are stealing ER insurance coverage and the bill is placed at the people who do pay insurance as well as the taxpayer.

Originally posted by telerion
A big part of the reason it is overpriced is because healthy people opt out. This increases the risk in the remaining pool. Since healthy people cannot credibly seperate themselves from the unhealthy, insurance companies cannot price each person according to their inividual risk. As a result they must use large pools and the law of large numbers. Classic adverse selection.

The reason it is over priced is because medical care is overpriced. That is where to make healthcare reform, not insurance mandates.

Originally posted by telerion
A big part of the reason it is overpriced is because healthy people opt out. This increases the risk in the remaining pool. Since healthy people cannot credibly seperate themselves from the unhealthy, insurance companies cannot price each person according to their inividual risk. As a result they must use large pools and the law of large numbers. Classic adverse selection.

In other words, insurance companies see to it that they turn a profit from their business as where government is more than happy losing money on the endevour. Brilliant!!

Originally posted by telerion
Because whodey I'm paying for it so quit your bitching 🙂 .

I'm paying for it as well, so why can't I complain? In fact, pretty soon all my health care decisions will first need to be approved by an elite group of unelected officials in Washington.

Originally posted by eljefejesus
[b]If we're gonna have an open debate with realistic perspectives, the undocumented population is not single handedly driving up costs,

The illegals may not be the main source of costs rising, however, that is not the point. The point is that Obama said that illegals were not being covered by the new proposed health care plan. Of course, if not, the quesiton begs as to what plan was in place if that was not the case? Of course, there was no plan, hence, he was lying his arse off. This is indicative of theh liberal approach of launching such massive peices of legislation without really knowing where it will all land. Simply put, they just want government in control at the tax payers expense with the added bonus of the private sector taking a hit. The costs have little to do with anything.

Originally posted by whodey
In other words, insurance companies see to it that they turn a profit from their business as where government is more than happy losing money on the endevour. Brilliant!!

No. That's actually not what I wrote.

Originally posted by whodey
The illegals may not be the main source of costs rising, however, that is not the point. The point is that Obama said that illegals were not being covered by the new proposed health care plan. Of course, if not, the quesiton begs as to what plan was in place if that was not the case? Of course, there was no plan, hence, he was lying his arse off. This is ...[text shortened]... the added bonus of the private sector taking a hit. The costs have little to do with anything.

Whodey, you've obviously made up your mind on this. I suspect that you will continue to distort the discussion come hell or high water until Glenn Beck or some conservative PAC spams your inbox with instructions to do otherwise.

Originally posted by whodey
pretty soon all my health care decisions will first need to be approved by an elite group of unelected officials in Washington.

What are you satirizing here? The disinformation campaign itself? Or your own "stance"?

Originally posted by whodey
In other words, insurance companies see to it that they turn a profit from their business as where government is more than happy losing money on the endevour. Brilliant!!

what telerion was saying is this:

Suppose you are an insurance company. There are two pools of people you're offering insurance. Group A is made of entirely of people who are young and-or very healthy. Group B is made up entirely of people who are older and already sick.

You do a study that shows that the typical person in Group A will spend about $1000 per year on healthcare - and the typical person in Group B will spend about $25,000 per year on healthcare.

If you want to make a nice profit on insuring Group A, you can charge a premium of $2000-yr. But if you want to make a profit on Group B, you'd have to charge a premium of greater than $25,000-yr.

Insurance companies generally want to avoid people in Group B (way too much risk), or they charge them extremely high premiums. Either way, it leaves almost everyone in this group unable to afford insurance they need.

To rectify this, we can ban insurance companies from discriminating against sick people -- we create a new Group AB and insurers have to offer everyone the same deal at the same price. A study is done and it finds that the typical person in this combined group will spend $9000-yr on healthcare. So the insurance company charges a premium of $10,000-yr.

Let's assume that everyone in Group AB can afford coverage at this price (government offers subsidies for those who are poor). But almost everyone originally in Group A is totally uninterested in paying $10,000-yr when they only expect to pay $1000-yr - so they all essentially drop out of the pool.

The result is that we're essentially back to Group B again. For the insurance companies to make a profit, they'd have to charge those high premiums that almost all of Group B can't afford.

Originally posted by FMF
What are you satirizing here? The disinformation campaign itself? Or your own "stance"?

Are you denying that "experts" will be assigned in government who are not elected who will be determining what procedures should or should not be done?

Originally posted by Melanerpes
what telerion was saying is this:

Suppose you are an insurance company. There are two pools of people you're offering insurance. Group A is made of entirely of people who are young and-or very healthy. Group B is made up entirely of people who are older and already sick.

You do a study that shows that the typical person in Group A will spend about $ ...[text shortened]... profit, they'd have to charge those high premiums that almost all of Group B can't afford.

I get it. All I can say is that when risk is not assigned to those insured then it is no longer insurance, rather, it becomes an entitlement. In addition, I make the prediction that this will be a failure fiscally for the US. I am not against helping the poor, but I am when it means driving the country into an abyss or lowering the care for those who already have access. In short, there is no magic bullet. What can I say, life is hard and complex and no one single peice of legislation, even if it is thousands of pages long, will do the job.

I might be in favor of something like this if in the bill they designate a time to vote for it again to stay active. You know, kinda like they do with tax cuts. Tax cuts are the ONLY peices of legislation that are inacted that have to be voted on again to stay current, or they die. That way it would force them to address reforms on a timely manner and force them to fix problems that this biil will assuradly produce. Of course, they won't do that. They will get it up and running and make it a sacred cow for all to worship.

Originally posted by whodey
Are you denying that "experts" will be assigned in government who are not elected who will be determining what procedures should or should not be done?

I wasn't denying anything. I was asking you what you were satirizing with your post.

Originally posted by whodey
I get it. All I can say is that when risk is not assigned to those insured then it is no longer insurance, rather, it becomes an entitlement. In addition, I make the prediction that this will be a failure fiscally for the US. I am not against helping the poor, but I am when it means driving the country into an abyss or lowering the care for those who alrea ...[text shortened]... ey won't do that. They will get it up and running and make it a sacred cow for all to worship.

I don't there's any requirement that tax cuts must have "expiration dates". The GOP put one into the Bush tax cut because they wanted to hide it's true cost once it was entirely phased in.

But I like the general idea that every program should have an expiration date (or some other feature) that would require it to be revisited periodically.

Originally posted by telerion
That's too strong. I don't want to pay for liability insurance on my car but I must. Hardcore Libertarians seem to struggle with the idea of externalities.

Still can't agree with you there, you can be a libertarian with full understanding of externalities and expect the government only to involve itself when absolutely nescessary regardless of the fact that it could do what many people would consider a socially nice and good thing if it became even more involved.

Originally posted by Melanerpes
what telerion was saying is this:

Suppose you are an insurance company. There are two pools of people you're offering insurance. Group A is made of entirely of people who are young and-or very healthy. Group B is made up entirely of people who are older and already sick.

You do a study that shows that the typical person in Group A will spend about $ ...[text shortened]... profit, they'd have to charge those high premiums that almost all of Group B can't afford.

You left out the part where some people are for the freedom of people to make the money to get a or b or to fail to make money and be stuck with neither, or to support other options that involve subsidy but not force.