Sunday, February 12, 2006
Battle plan for destroying the healthcare system
If you love insurance companies, you'll love the new Bush healthcare plan. According to Froma Harrop, the basic changes Bush is proposing are:
1. Eliminate company expensing of employee healthcare
2. Allow people to establish accounts to cover medical expenses, paying no taxes on the income deposited or on any money made.
3. Require people to buy Medical Savings Accounts for catastrophic coverage.
The predictable effects are that:
1. The Treasury will lose another $156 billion in revenues over 10 years. That's enough to provide coverage for millions of people.
2. Almost all of that money will be a tax break to the wealthy.
3. Small businesses, and perhaps some larger ones, will drop coverage. Harrop predicts that over a million poor/middle class people will lose all coverage and points out the parallel to how the shift from pensions to 401(k)s shifted costs and risks from employers to employees.
4. GOP contributors like Golden Rule will make out like bandits
I think there's another predictable effect, namely that the healthcare system will collapse as healthcare costs spiral out of control.
But of course by then, the Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Showwill have struck its tents and moved on.
Comments:
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You left out the most important part of the plan. Use the corporate media to make it the common recieved knowlege that "medicare is falling apart and must be destroyed to save it,". Just like they did with "Social Security isn't going to be there for the baby boomers". You hear it about ten times a day on TV between the insurance company and drug commercials.
# posted by 
: 2/12/2006 12:05:00 PM
: 2/12/2006 12:05:00 PM
I hate to say this, but Medicare *is* falling apart.
Not because there is anything wrong with Medicare, but because health costs are rising at twice the rate of inflation (or more), and have been for 25 years. Even Clinton's cost containment was far less successful than advertised.
The media boy has been crying "wolf" about Social Security. He may very well be eaten by Medicare.
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Not because there is anything wrong with Medicare, but because health costs are rising at twice the rate of inflation (or more), and have been for 25 years. Even Clinton's cost containment was far less successful than advertised.
The media boy has been crying "wolf" about Social Security. He may very well be eaten by Medicare.
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