Non Sequitur

Cartoon: Insurance Premiums

Health Care Insurance

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Health Care Models

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My thoughts: What could possibly go wrong?

Unintended Consequences: Obamacare

Fewer insured, higher costs might be the result.

Obamacare could have the unintended consequence of raising health insurance premiums and causing a decline in the number of people with insurance.

Here's why: A key feature of the House and Senate health bills would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to anyone with preexisting conditions. The new coverage would start immediately, and the premium could not reflect the individual's health condition.

This well-intentioned feature would provide a strong incentive for someone who is healthy to drop his or her health insurance, saving the substantial premium costs. After all, if serious illness hit this person or a family member, he could immediately obtain coverage. As healthy individuals decline coverage in this way, insurance companies would come to have a sicker population. The higher cost of insuring that group would force insurers to raise their premiums. (Separate accident policies might develop to deal with the risk of high-cost care after accidents when there is insufficient time to buy insurance.)

The higher premium level would cause others who are currently insured to drop coverage, pushing premiums even higher. The result would be a spiral of rising premiums and shrinking numbers of insured.

In an attempt to prevent this, the draft legislation provides penalties for individuals who choose not to buy insurance and for employers that do not offer health insurance. But the levels of these fines are generally too low to cause a rational individual to insure.

read the article

Cartoon: Healthcare Reform and Costs

Healthcare Cost Estimates

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Ron Paul on Healthcare Reform

As the healthcare debate rages on, there is one reality that even the proponents of this hostile takeover of healthcare by government cannot ignore – and that is money. The government simply does not have the money for a new, expansive, public healthcare plan. The country is in a deep recession that will deepen even further with the coming collapse of the commercial real estate market. The last thing we need is for government to increase and expand taxes to pay for another damaging, wasteful program. Foreigners are becoming less enthusiastic about buying our debt, and creating another open-ended welfare program when we cannot pay for what is already in place, will not help. Champions of socialized medicine want to tax the rich, tax businesses that already cannot afford to provide health plans to employees, and tax people who don’t want to participate in the government’s scheme by buying an approved healthcare plan. Presumably, all these taxes are to induce compliance. This is not freedom, nor will it improve healthcare...

The leadership in Washington persists in a fantasy world of unlimited money to spend on unlimited programs and wars to garner unlimited control. But there is a fast-approaching limit to our ability to borrow, steal, and print. Acknowledging this reality is not mean-spirited or cruel. On the contrary, it could be the only thing that saves us from complete and total economic meltdown.

read the entire essay

Health Reform Costs

Three committees writing the lead House bill have called for an additional tax to be imposed on income above $280,000 for singles and $350,000 for married couples. The so-called surtax would run as high as 5.4% on income over $1 million.

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., this week began pushing for the surtax to apply only to singles making more than $500,000 and couples making more than $1 million...

A surtax is a tax on top of a person's ordinary income tax. In the case of the House-proposed surtax, the income over the threshold would be taxed at both the top income tax rate -- scheduled to be 39.6% --plus the surtax rate.

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the surtax under the $280,000/$350,000 proposal would raise $544 billion over 10 years.

read the CNN article

Cartoon: Health Care

Cartoon: Obamacare

Health Care Solution: Buy Some!!!

from Mark Perry:

If you can afford a cell phone or cable TV, you can afford basic health insurance. In Michigan, you can get basic health insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield starting at $47.14 per month for those 18-30 years old (about the cost of a basic cell phone plan), and starting at $168.13 per month for another plan for individuals under 65 and families (not too much more than a cable TV plan with premium channels, and about the same as two cells phones at the monthly average of $77).

Cartoon: Health Care Options

Cartoon: Health Care Costs

Cartoon: H.M.O.

Health Care Costs

from a Dutch study:

"Preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it doesn't save money, researchers reported Monday. It costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer, according to a Dutch study that counters the common perception that preventing obesity would save governments millions of dollars. "It was a small surprise," said Pieter van Baal, an economist at the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, who led the study. "But it also makes sense. If you live longer, then you cost the health system more."In a paper published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers....Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on. The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000. The results counter the common perception that preventing obesity will save health systems worldwide millions of dollars."

read more here.

If the goal is reduce government expenses they healthy lifestyles are bad.