Why do Republicans hate the “individual mandate”?
For some reason, Republicans really hate the so-called “individual mandate” which requires people to buy health insurance, otherwise they pay a reasonable small amount in extra taxes.
When someone gets sick and shows up at the hospital without insurance and without the ability to pay, what happens is that they get treated and then the costs of their treatment get passed along to everyone else. So people without insurance are free riders. The “individual mandate” is necessary to address the free-rider problem
Republicans should only be able to oppose the individual mandate if they are going to pass a law that says that if someone gets sick and they don’t have any money or insurance, the hospital will just kick them out and let them die. But I don’t know about a single Republican who is proposing that (except maybe Ron Paul?), and in fact it was the great Republican Ronald Reagan who signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act into law.
Lion of the Blogosphere 
There is no point in asking smart questions when you are talking about the stupid party.
Jonathan
September 25, 2013 at 5:29 PM
Democrats are the stupid party? Are you serious? Just because they’ve got the black vote locked up doesn’t automatically make them the stupid party.
(I say that as someone who leans far to the right on most issues.)
Renault
September 25, 2013 at 11:31 PM
Looks like I completely misread your comment. I had another tab open and got confused on what thread I was on.
Renault
September 25, 2013 at 11:32 PM
If the hospitals refuse to treat the illegals about 70% of this problem would be solved.
Colmainen
September 25, 2013 at 5:56 PM
I believe it is a felony to do so in Texas. No one has ever been prosecuted for it.
d0jistar
September 26, 2013 at 9:22 AM
There are several valid objections to the individual mandate, but the most obvious one is that the premiums are non-actuarial.
So, for example, the law requires you to have auto insurance. But the auto insurance company has spent lots of money collecting huge amounts of data on which they’ve done a series of sophisticated regression analyses and built actuarial tables to determine your riskiness. The auto insurance companies look at all the (legally allowable) relevant variables – your age, income, marital status, sometimes gender, they used to look at race which is indeed predictive, but that’s now illegal, naturally, etc. And they use all that to figure out how much you’ll actually cost them in the long run, and they spread that cost plus some profit margin out for you in regular payments. Credit companies do similar with credit scores, and homeowners insurance companies also do the same.
For these plans also have considerable choice and flexibility in determining the extent of your coverage, what perks are included, and the level of deductible. Bottom Line: You get what you pay for, and you are only really ‘pooling risk’ with similarly situated individuals.
But Health Insurance (a misnomer, but I digress), is very different under Obamacare. The government dictates the minimum coverage (you can’t opt-out of any subsidized service – even birth control – and get a lower rate reflective of your opt-out), and spreads the cost around without rational regard for your individual riskiness. So, a healthy young male ought to be able to buy a no-frills, bare-bones, high deductible catastrophic plan for pennies, (like that which would be available to him – in fact was available to him until recently – in a private, non-mandated market) but instead he has to buy a much more generous insurance plan and subsidize people who, on average, are expected to cost a lot more than he will. The government gets the redistribution, but gets to use the ‘private’ insurance companies as the enforcement mechanism, so it doesn’t look like public policy touches affects the federal budget except through some premium subsidies. But most of the subsidies are not, in fact, governmental, but done through the premiums themselves.
And you can’t opt out of that socialized system, because it’s mandatory.
At this point you may see that the mandate is far from being merely about the free rider problem under adverse selection conditions. We could have chosen to subsidize sick and poor people directly under the public fisc which would generate revenue largely from middle-aged people in higher tax brackets instead of young people struggling to get by. You’re all about soaking the rich with taxes, well, the mandate means the rich pay less than their usual share for new public policy.
Relatedly – “Kicked out on the street and left to die” is a long way from getting a bill for services rendered in circumstances of necessity. It’s not all magically forgiven everywhere. Can’t pay the bill? We have Medicaid and Bankruptcy for that. This is how some other countries do it, especially if you’re a foreign tourist traveling there. They don’t let you die in the street either because, duh, people don’t do that. But why should they send you a bill and expect you pay as much as you can towards it?
But what EMTALA and COBRA didn’t do was fund the mandate by fully reimbursing medical centers for their costs. So, instead of taking fiscal responsibility for public policy, it outsourced redistribution to commandeered hospitals who had to shift the extra burden onto the insured (through raised premiums) or violate the law.
Notice the pattern? It’s everywhere. It’s the future of government.
Handle
September 25, 2013 at 6:05 PM
“no-frills, bare-bones, high deductible catastrophic plan for pennies”
There’s no such plan available in New York State.
Also, there’s the believe that in an advanced society like ours, people shouldn’t be allowed to die just because insurance companies thought they were too risky to insure.
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 25, 2013 at 8:24 PM
Yeah, which is why if the advanced society wants to provide risky people with medical care, it can do so in a lot of ways which don’t require a mandate.
It can give them care directly (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.)
Or it can come up with a ‘reasonable maximum health insurance premium’ that is all we expect anyone of a certain income to pay, regardless of their conditions, and directly subsidize the difference between that reasonable rate and whatever it costs the insurance company to provide care. That’s half of what obamacare does.
There’s never ‘too risky to insure’. There’s always a premium level that matches the expected cost.
The question is only who bears that cost and how. Not whether anybody is going to let anybody die in the streets. That is merely a strawman.
Handle
September 25, 2013 at 8:33 PM
That’s shallow flapdoodle. Society recently paid for a double lung transplant for a girl who will not pay a penny in taxes or insurance premiums and will live an expensive, subsidized existence to age 30, if that. There is no reason other than free-floating sentiment why we should spend other people’s money to keep her alive as opposed to accepting the reality of a harsh world with scarce resources and the inevitability of decay and death.
If insurance companies, competing for good risks, think something is too risky too insure, then that’s the first big red flag that something really is not sustainable absent coerced transfer payments.
The Anti-Gnostic
September 25, 2013 at 11:25 PM
But it was REPUBLICANS who used the propaganda term “death panels” to describe triage that would deny care to that person. NOT Obama.
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 26, 2013 at 6:36 AM
I’m not a Republican, so that argument is wasted on me.
The Anti-Gnostic
September 26, 2013 at 8:14 AM
There is no such plan in New York state because the state essentially banned them. NY went to community rating many years ago. They proved to the rest of the states why community rating is a disaster and leads to “the death spiral”. New York’s experience is why community rating had to be paired with a mandate. BTW-Emtla destroyed the community teaching hospitals/rural hospitals along with increasing insurance rates for everyone.
regularjoeski
September 26, 2013 at 9:15 AM
“There is no reason other than free-floating sentiment why we should spend other people’s money to keep her alive”
While there is no doubt that the dying, nearly dead, and comatose are kept alive too long by artificial means, in the case you cite, and other examples like it, there are educational, technological, and research benefits to performing cutting edge surgeries as they allow medicine to push the envelope, which has a trickle down effect on other facets of healthcare.
islandmommy
September 26, 2013 at 10:28 AM
“There’s no such plan available in New York State”
You’ll need to clarify. My employer offers such a plan to New York employees. Are you talking about ACA plans specifically or individual plans in general? I’m guessing the former, but I’m curious. In any case, that statement doesn’t apply to group plans.
I’m also curious what specific changes the ACA made to pre-existing coverage, as group plans have been barred from excluding pre-existing conditions for at least 30 years. Does the new law still permit the “grace” period?
J1
September 28, 2013 at 11:34 AM
The unsubsidized cost of an Obamacare “Bronze” plan for someone in their 20’s, which is actually a very good plan that includes a cap on out-of-pocket spending of $6200, is something like $200 a month in California. If you make less than 400% of the poverty line, it is even less because you get a subsidy. So young healthy people are not really burdened. In California, an extremely bare-boned plan for people under 30 could be had for ~$75 a month, but it was hard to qualify for, less generous than Bronze, and did not cover preexisting conditions. And as Lion says, NY didn’t even have such a plan.
The removal of the preexisting conditions restriction from insurance contracts is a big cut in administrative waste and overhead. Insurance companies went to great efforts to force people to document these before signing up, investigating them, and combing through bills to challenge services that they claim were preexisting.
Extending the time young people could stay on their parents’ employer insurance from 23 to 25 was also a giant benefit for the age group most likely to have a very low income and lack a full-time job with health insurance. Half of my age peers suddenly went from insured to uninsured when they turned 24 for this reason.
bob
September 25, 2013 at 11:03 PM
Then there are one or both of two things wrong here. Either you are a net-consuming failure as an adult, or there are externalities and rent-seeking which are raising the costs of the transition to adulthood. Whatever is going on, it’s a huge inefficiency and ultimately will not be paid. Young adults will either figure it out or they will die.
The Anti-Gnostic
September 25, 2013 at 11:41 PM
The government dictates the minimum coverage (you can’t opt-out of any subsidized service – even birth control – and get a lower rate reflective of your opt-out), and spreads the cost around without rational regard for your individual riskiness. — Handle
I completely agree with Handle. I have a minor objection over the individual mandate in the sense that the government shouldn’t force you to buy something. Now, I don’t mind it when it comes to car insurance because they only require liability which is to mitigate your risk to others. However, the gov doesn’t require you to get collision for yourself. That’s completely different. However, my main objection is to the wealth redistribution aspect.
”
Also, there’s the believe that in an advanced society like ours, people shouldn’t be allowed to die just because insurance companies thought they were too risky to insure. — LotB
Handle already addressed that — they don’t. However, you’ve raised the issue of life vs cost. You could prolong the lives of an awful lot of people if you were willing to spend millions of dollars apiece to do it. Should they spend millions of dollars apiece? How about tens of millions apiece? At some point it really is a matter of economics regardless of what you believe an “advanced society like ours” should do. Even the leftists agree which is why countries with socialist medicine have death panels. The difference between death panels and freedom is that with freedom you get to use your own resources and it’s your choice what you do with those resources. Liberals say they support freedom of choice. They don’t. They’re just children throwing a tantrum.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdyKAIhLdNs)
destructure
September 26, 2013 at 6:09 AM
The individual mandate was a right-wing idea supported by the Heritage Foundation. The Republicans hate it now because it is now a left-wing idea. The mandate itself will have no impact because the law exempts too many people from the penalty tax.
radicaldesi
September 25, 2013 at 6:07 PM
Lion puts forth the mandate as a solution to the free-rider problem, but this is mostly nonsense. Very few of those free-riders will now buy insurance. They won’t suffer any income tax penalty for not doing so, because their income is too low. Only those with pre-existing conditions may bother, and they will end up consuming far more health care services than the premiums they pay. The net effect may be an increase in the costs that get passed along to everyone else.
steve@steve.com
September 26, 2013 at 2:09 PM
The individual mandate was one Heritage Foundation policy analyst’s idea. When did one guy at Heritage come to represent every person to the right of Clinton? Libertarian wing of GOP hated the individual mandate. Cato killed Romney back in 2006/2007.
dsgntd_plyr
September 26, 2013 at 7:15 PM
well its true this was a conservative solution at one point for the freeloaders. but I think a few things changed that. they realized it would be used to eliminate all private care while giving more below market care to more people. and effectivly creating national health. and I think others realized it was an affront to our right to not participate but the problem is as usual the principled ones already have insurance so its really giving the freeloaders that right but i am one former republican that would at least do what mexico does to our citizens which is come up with the cash before hand or we are not helping
viking
September 25, 2013 at 7:07 PM
Easy. Because it’s forcing people to buy a product–medical care insurance–that they may otherwise have chosen not to buy or use. It’s fascism. It’s the state forcing people to engage in a certain type of commerce that they may not have done otherwise, no limit. It’s contingent on nothing, thus there is no analogy to vehicle liability insurance, so don’t even go there. Some people pay cash when they get medical treatment, and some people eschew treatment and just live or die with their problems. That should be their choice to make.
And the people most likely to use the ER for their medical treatment are not affected by the individual mandate: they are mostly poor and so are covered either by state medical welfare programs and/or get 100% subsidies through the exchanges. Thus, the penalty and/or tax imposed by RobertsCare falls mostly on middle class white people, especially men, whose employers don’t provide medical care insurance as a benefit. This penalty and/or tax will be in addition to whatever taxes we pay now to provide treatment to indigent folks. RobertsCare destroys the middle class because it will suck up whatever wealth which might have otherwise gone to savings or other purchases. If most people actually comply, it will likely cause a recession as people will feel much poorer when they lose their annual tax refund and/or lose a big chunk of their monthly earnings to pay ever-increasing premiums on a product they might not even use.
Also, because Obama is black.
dufus maximus
September 25, 2013 at 7:21 PM
AND . . . you shouldn’t be so sanguine about the idea that the government can force its citizens at the point of a gun to buy things. Because of demographics, the Democraps will have supermajorities in Kongress starting very soon, and of course no Republican will ever get elected to the White House again. Once this happens, Katy bar the door. I guarantee these two mandates: you must put solar panels on your house’s roof, subject to a very reasonable tax of 2% of you earnings until you comply. You have two years to buy a hybrid or electric vehicle. If you don’t comply, you will be subject to a very reasonable 2% tax of your earnings until you comply. It will never end. Ever.
Regardless of what that one barely-closeted pederast on the Supreme Kourt said, the mandate is unconstitutional. Nowhere does the constitution or its amendments authorize the government to force its citizens to buy medical care insurance.
dufus maximus
September 25, 2013 at 7:28 PM
Which of the 5 are you libeling?
ScarletNumber
September 26, 2013 at 6:26 PM
Because the individual mandate is designed to soak even more the middle class white people it’s intended to tax. Costs are shifted toward white people and benefits are shifted toward blacks and hispanics.
Basically, the individual mandate and other health exchange programs are designed to get white people completely under the thumb of the Democrat-controlled state so the Dems can decide how quickly the whites should die. The individual mandate and the health exchange is designed to destroy the independence and choice of quality care that whites currently enjoy and to put them at the mercy of the minorities that will be administering these programs. The entire healthcare system becomes one giant nursing home with helpless, elderly whites and sullen and abusive minority caretakers.
The Right needs to get over its Reagan fetish. Along with immigration and terrorism, Reagan put us on the road to the healthcare mandate.
map
September 25, 2013 at 7:30 PM
“Costs are shifted toward white people and benefits are shifted toward blacks and hispanics.”
No, NAMs already get Medicaid if they are poor, and a very large portion of middle class NAMs work for the public sector and already get good health benefits.
The costs of Obamacare fall largely on the rich and the biggest beneficiaries are people age 50-65 who make too much for Medicaid, don’t get employer insurance, but can’t afford unsubsidized individual market insurance. In other words: mostly working and middle class whites who are self-employed or work at small businesses that don’t have health benefits.
So you’re right that the costs will mostly be paid by the largely white 1%, but the benefits largely go to whites too. Controlling hospital/doctor payments will also disproportionately hit Asians.
bob
September 25, 2013 at 11:21 PM
Right. The rich 1% own the government so they devised a medical system designed to impose taxes on themselves. Furthermore, those NAMS do not include illegals, of which ObamaCare will shift even more resources toward.
Big companies like Walgreens have already dumped their health insurance programs and put their workers on exchanges. Who do you think this cost shifting arrangement benefits?
map
September 26, 2013 at 12:59 AM
No, NAMs already get Medicaid if they are poor,
So dumb minorities have Medicaid (and possibly better benefits on it than they would on Obamacare), the elderly have Medicare, white college students can stay on their parent’s plan until they get job.
If that’s so, then how will enough young, healthy whites signup for the plans to keep the exchanges from imploding?
The Undiscovered Jew
September 25, 2013 at 11:55 PM
“So dumb minorities have Medicaid (and possibly better benefits on it than they would on Obamacare)”
Medicaid is crap compared to any of the Obamacare plans, which are comparable to mid-range employer provided HMO and PPO plans.
“If that’s so, then how will enough young, healthy whites signup for the plans to keep the exchanges from imploding?”
Because it is cheap to start with, and even cheaper if you get subsidies because you make under 400% of the poverty line. Also you pay a fine if you don’t.
Zoink
September 27, 2013 at 5:29 AM
I hate the individual mandate because everyone is forced to buy expensive and comprehensive insurance as opposed to buying less expensive insurance that fits their needs. Also, Obamacare requires the insurance companies to overcharge young people for the benefit of older people. In particular, young males are forced to pay roughly double or more of what they should to subsidize older women.
ColRebSez
September 25, 2013 at 7:41 PM
I believe in the mandate, you can choose the most basic healthcare at a very low rate. If not, you would qualify for gov’t medicare/medicaid insurance for being dirt poor.
JS
September 25, 2013 at 9:43 PM
Good point, Lion.
I think what Republicans fear is that the ACA is only the first step toward complete socialized medicine. I am not sure how realistic that fear is, but it is what a lot of the hysteria over the ACA is about.
Jay
September 25, 2013 at 7:56 PM
There is a large air space between kicking people out of the emergency room and the comprehensive package of pre-paid services mandated by PPACA.
What would an emergency-only policy cost, if it were legal to offer one?
BTW, EMTALA doesn’t require treating someone who “gets sick.” It requires evaluating them (not free) and treating immediately life-threatening (or limb-threatening, etc.) conditions. After that, or if no such conditions are found, the hospital is free to kick them out.
Anonymous
September 25, 2013 at 8:09 PM
The “individual mandate” is necessary to address the free-rider problem
It’s the totality of the law that’s flawed. By itself, the mandate wouldn’t be disastrous policy but for the remainder of O-care.
If we had the health policy of Switzerland and Singapore – near universal health savings accounts coupled with nationalized catastrophic health insurance – we’d have a good system. It’s only catastrophic health costs which the government should guard against. Routine care and the the medical sector could then be left free from overly intrusive regulations once private insurers don’t have to absorb the heaviest expenses.
While many of your criticisms of capitalism and corporations have truth to them, the fact remains the best economic results for society are where fiscal policy is 80-90% capitalist and 10-20% socialist.
But liberals don’t want this because, as utopian bureaucrats/totalitarian bureaucrats (which is worse than Communism) the liberals pass policy to strengthen the bureaucracy with overly complex policies.
In healthcare, as in everything else, the liberal equation is to invest as many resources as politically possible into the worst politically possible scheme.
The Undiscovered Jew
September 25, 2013 at 9:01 PM
Switzerland and Singapore also have extensive price controls which would be even more necessary in the US because of its low population density limits competition in many areas of the country.
reynald
September 26, 2013 at 1:21 PM
Lion, why do you vote/consider yourself a Republican? Seriously.
The individual mandate has the effect of charging households headed by white men extra and giving benefits to mostly households headed by black and Hispanic women, is it any surprise that the party that gets mostly white male votes opposes it?
massivefocusedinaction
September 25, 2013 at 10:20 PM
“Lion, why do you vote/consider yourself a Republican? Seriously.”
Race
dsgntd_plyr
September 26, 2013 at 7:17 PM
Why do you persist in believing that the only way that the Republicans can survive is by becoming a carbon copy of the Democrats? Logically, the Republicans should go after the voters that the Democrats have alienated which means that it makes sense for the GOP to try to win the votes of people who are opposed to the individual mandate.
Joe Walker
September 25, 2013 at 10:21 PM
High deductible plans are the way to go, and Obamacare restricts them. Case closed.
Nobody is allowed to “die on the street”. If you show up without insurance, you get care and a bill. It might be a massive bill, and you might not pay it, but from my experience, nobody pays their bills anyway today, medical or otherwise. God forbid you’re in the unsecured credit business, the loses must be absolutely huge these days.
Buzzcut
September 25, 2013 at 10:33 PM
MSAs are only allowed if you have a qualifying high-deductible plan, and many of the ones I saw on the California ACA exchange are MSA-eligable.
The bronze plan is more or less a high-deductible plan. You have a large co-pay for almost every service, but then an out-of-pocket cap that you’ll only hit if you become very sick.
Zoink
September 26, 2013 at 3:07 AM
Oh Lion, try explaining this one away,
A mighty 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs come from Harvard:
The Universities That Produce The Most CEOs
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/09/25/the-universities-that-produce-the-most-ceos/
Twenty-five of the 500 went to Harvard, 13 went to the University of Tokyo and 11 to Stanford. Times Higher Education (THE), a London magazine that tracks the higher education market, combed through the list of the world’s 500 top CEOS and examined the educational background of each boss. It produced a list of CEOs and their degrees. Read the complete list here.
The Undiscovered Jew
September 25, 2013 at 10:33 PM
I guess this means not even Harvard is worth the money.
The Undiscovered Jew
September 25, 2013 at 10:37 PM
Today’s CEOs began their careers in a very different era.
Show me that list again in 20 years they’ll all be ivy league.
eradican
September 26, 2013 at 5:20 AM
Harvard produces the most billionaires of all the schools in the US. A total of 52. #1 in the nation.
My 2 beloved schools in NYC, NYU and Columbia, rank #4 and #5 respectively, and also lead the country with their top law schools along with Harvard.
Lion’s alma mater, UPenn is # 2 on the list, and #3 is HYPS – the university of the Google boys.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-u-why-harvard-mints-200315236.html
JS
September 25, 2013 at 11:49 PM
Lion – Chinatown in downtown Manhattan seems to be the only large missing puzzle for an unified boboland.
Geographically, Chinatown connects the LES, Little Italy, Financial District, Tribeca, Soho and the West Village. It would make sense that Whites make better inhabitants in the area.
Sofia Coppola, the daughter of the Godfather Mogul – Francis Coppola, has her eyes set on a pricey condo in Little Italy. Wealthy Italian bobos are set to displace their prolish ancestors who were the real capisces.
JS
September 26, 2013 at 12:08 AM
I’m actually very, very surprised that NYU’s so high on that list. Is it because the school is so huge? Because it attracts people who are already wealthy?
Renault
September 26, 2013 at 8:08 AM
Yes, yes, and because it’s in Manhattan.
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 26, 2013 at 10:43 AM
The “Google boys” didn’t go to Stanford undergrad. Larry went to Michigan and Sergey went to UMD.
Renault
September 26, 2013 at 8:16 AM
“I’m actually very, very surprised that NYU’s so high on that list. Is it because the school is so huge? Because it attracts people who are already wealthy?”
NYU is considered a strange institution, no enclosed campus for a big school and they have “campuses” all over the world. They have had rich celebrities in the past, such as the Olsen Twins and James Franco, and they also take in the typical Asian nerds as well. This being said, the prestige of the school has shot up over the years, because its administration decided to only admit very smart kids and/or wealthy ones, due to its desirable location in the Village.
I find NYU kids to be arrogant and very socially savvy. They’ll like you, if you have status or come across as smart. Columbia students are generally nicer and more easy going, and surprisingly less status conscious.
JS
September 26, 2013 at 11:23 AM
“The “Google boys” didn’t go to Stanford undergrad. Larry went to Michigan and Sergey went to UMD”.
That list probably includes graduate alums.
JS
September 26, 2013 at 11:27 AM
“Because it attracts people who are already wealthy?”
Documentarian-slash-socialite Jamie Johnson (of johnson & johnson pedigree) majored in US history at NYU. He’s dumb as a post so I doubt his SAT scores carried him through admission.
islandmommy
September 26, 2013 at 11:46 AM
You don’t have to be a genius to get into NYU. It was always viewed as a safety school back when I was in high school.
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 26, 2013 at 12:21 PM
“You don’t have to be a genius to get into NYU. It was always viewed as a safety school back when I was in high school”.
It’s not a safety school anymore. The demographics for NYU back in the day were mostly working/middle class commuting prole types. It’s now a haven for wealthy kids and aspiring bobos from all over the country and around the world. They also up the SAT scores requirement, not as high as Columbia, but still high above the 2K mark.
http://www.satscores.us/sat_scores_by_college.asp?College_ID=193900
You probably don’t have to be a genius to get into HYP either, if you have other things they’re looking for.
Lion, get with the times, as you always have!
JS
September 26, 2013 at 12:43 PM
“The demographics for NYU back in the day were mostly working/middle class commuting prole types.”
True, in fact I’m good friends with a bonafide prole who commuted to NYU from east ny back in the day. When I learned his alma mater I had to stop myself from asking, if he was certain.
islandmommy
September 26, 2013 at 1:54 PM
The “Google boys” didn’t go to Stanford undergrad. Larry went to Michigan and Sergey went to UMD.
Renault, JS, and others, I’d bet Gen-X CEOs in their 30s and 40s are more likely to come from non-elite UG schools than boomers because of affirmative action. I read somewhere back (can’t find the link) that the percentage of fortune 500 CEOs with Harvard degrees has declined since the 80s when most CEOs had completed college before Nixon created affirmative action.
AA hasn’t created a black ruling class so much as it’s pushed future white elites into lower ranked schools. One day, millennial CEOs will be even more likely to come from the lower tier than Gen-Xers.
I’d also like to know where Ivy League black and Hispanic quota admittees go if they’re not making it to the top of the corporate food chain. Presumably they end up in government jobs or corporate HR.
The Undiscovered Jew
September 28, 2013 at 6:05 PM
@ TUJ
You forget to mention Asians, who are overrepresented in the Ivies, despite their claims of discrimination. I’m sure you have been reading my posts about Asian achievement vs White achievement, and the lack thereof coming from the former.
JS
September 28, 2013 at 8:20 PM
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, both Harvard dropouts, downgraded themselves to prole status.
Microsoft is no doubt a prole company, churning out prole technology for proles. The idea that you can get a certification for a MS product and bank a six digit salary without a college degree, exploited by many prole schools which attracts proles, is essential very prole.
Steve Jobs never pushed his products to be of any of this sort. It was strictly for a SWPL crowd, who don’t care about the inner workings of his technology.
JS
September 26, 2013 at 9:58 AM
You forget to mention Asians, who are overrepresented in the Ivies,
I’ve made the same point that elite education is a waste on Asians because they don’t make scientific breakthroughs and achieve elite positions like white students do.
The Undiscovered Jew
September 29, 2013 at 2:02 PM
CEOs are little more than glorified butlers. CEOs are not toos. Even the most well known CEOs are nothing after they retire from their big companies. They might jump with a golden parachute but their descendants won’t be joining the lank of toos unless they came from toos background.
Colmainen
September 26, 2013 at 1:34 PM
I bet all of the Univ of Tokyo grad CEOs work for companies based in Japan, which has a different system from America (in which the national universities are the most prestigious and private colleges run a distant second).
Colmainen
September 26, 2013 at 1:36 PM
You know, I’m tired of this debate. I’m tired of the debate for all of America’s problems from crime to welfare to schools. Because when you get down to it the *real* problem behind all the problems are the massive low IQ and violent underclasses of the brown and black contingents; legal and illegal.
The insatiable thirst of America’s govt. and big business for cheap votes/labor has always been it’s undoing.
fakeemail
September 25, 2013 at 10:43 PM
Republicans don’t hate the “individual mandate.” That is all political nonsense.
Republicans are afraid that Obamacare will work. People will like it, especially poor and minorities, but also the middle class.
The modern Republican party is all about cutting taxes for the wealthy. That means convincing people government can’t do anything for them. Social Security and Medicare are now almost untouchable, although Republicans keep trying. If people like Obamacare, it will become untouchable too.
Republicans are just throwing everything they can think of against the wall to convince people Obamacare will be a disaster. If they really believed that Obamacare was sure to be a train wreck, they would let it go into effect. After everyone saw it was a disaster, it would be easy to repeal. They are trying to stop it now, because they are afraid it will work.
Remember for the last few years house Republicans have voted to change Medicare (a government run single payer health care system for Americans over 65) into an Obamacare like system. If Republicans really believed that Obamacare like systems cannot work, why have they been voting to change Medicare into an Obamacare like system?
mikeca
September 26, 2013 at 3:03 AM
If people were really opposed to the individual mandate because it represented and unprecedented level of government involvement in people’s lives (which it does) than they would be more much more accepting of a single payer medicare for all style system because that is totally with precedent. But obviously the vast majority of people saying they are opposed to the system because of the mandate would be even more opposed to a single payer plan and they are therefore full of it.
What republicans and most people on this board don’t realize is that most poeple don’t care about whether their health care system aligns with some abstract, arbitrary set of values.
reynald
September 26, 2013 at 1:12 PM
We make people buy car insurance. How is making people buy another type of insurance more unprecedented? We also make people pay taxes for public education they may not want for their own children. Or for fire protection they may not think they need. Etc.
For that matter, we already have Medicare and Medicaid. Making people pay for healthcare through their taxes is not unprecdented, it’s what we have done for a long time. And it was REPUBLICANS saying we should be scared of Obamacare because it might reduce medicare benefits.
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 26, 2013 at 3:28 PM
You obviously didn’t understand my post because I explicitly said that a medicare would act as a precedent of a single payer system. My point was that people opposing obamacare because of its unprecedentedness are hypocrites because they are even more opposed to a universal single payer system which is just an extension of medicare, an existing system, and it unprecedented.
Obamacare is unprecedented (like many laws in US history) because mandating car insurance is part of a range of restrictions placed on people who want to drive and not a universal requirement.
reynald
September 26, 2013 at 4:28 PM
“Private insurance companies push for ‘individual mandate'”
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/07/business/fi-healthcare7
I see the individual mandate as a form of corporate fascism. It primarily benefits insurance companies by providing them with more customers, but it is disguised to be a compassionate solution to insure everyone. I suppose it’s better to have a mandate than to not have a mandate (lesser evil), but it’s still much worse than a single payer system. Insurance companies have much power and influence and will not allow a single payer system to take a large chunk of their revenue. How ever the politicians legislate health care, the primary beneficiary will always the insurance companies.
bobo
September 26, 2013 at 7:05 AM
Democrats wanted a public option, but Republicans opposed it, to protect corporate profits.
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 26, 2013 at 8:25 AM
One important issue that nobody is address is group cohesion, e.g., ethnic cohesion. Countries like Germany, Denmark, Lithuania (?) have very good socialized medicine. It is accepted and acceptable because everyone views it as aiding members of there own group – which, with the exception of some recent immigrants, is the one and only group. In group/family behavior is highly socialized (in the political sense).
Just a guy
September 26, 2013 at 9:06 AM
I keep reading this nonsense:
“I shouldn’t be forced to participate”
Because of your survival instinct we can honestly assume you’ll surely participate when you’re injured. Oh yes you will. I don’t see this important point being played out in the current political battles over risk allotment.
High deductible catastrophic plans aren’t popular with “insurance” companies because they are low margin plans; expensive to maintain, hard to protect against fraud, hard to estimate future costs of injury, and expensive if a payout has to occur. That’s why the private market for such plans is small. Because this market is small from the perspective of state insurance commissioners it’s not worth paying attention to. So on top of that you have a lackadaisical legal framework to deal with if your “insurance” company refuses to pay if you do end up getting hurt. I think the “insurance” companies are signaling they WANT the government to take over catastrophic risk allotment… They will simply administrate it, very low risk.
Treating healthcare like a commodity isn’t working. Hospitals might treat injuries as a tradable resource, but humans don’t. Humans don’t measure risk well. They’re too optimistic. They won’t pay until they have to. In the case of an injury it’s too late, at which point a care provider has a lot of leverage. They can charge whatever they want because they know someone who is hurt will pay anything to make the pain and bleeding go away. This is where “insurance” comes into play and why it matters that we take care of the incentives and perverse incentives wrecking risk allotment in our society. “Insurance” companies mostly deal with large provider groups and the government anyway because it’s the only way to pool enough people into a plan in order to make it worth “insuring”.
I call the following my healthcare patriot freedom plan:
There is a solution for those who refuse to insure themselves because they shouldn’t be forced to pay for the risks they take (like driving a car on a highway at high speed while talking on their cell phone)(but it’s universally unaccepted from what I can tell). If you get hurt and you aren’t insured a care provider shouldn’t be forced to see you. The provider has the freedom to say no.
Who should be forced to pay something at what time? Let’s stop pretending that this matters.
When was the last time republicans raged against mandatory car insurance?
healthcare patriot freedom plan
September 26, 2013 at 9:15 AM
Why do republicans hate the individual mandate? Let me count the ways.
1) requiring people to buy coverage doesn’t solve the issue of coverage being out of reach for many; it’s like solving homelessness by requiring everyone buy a house. This will lead to
2) people being covered in name only, with paltry plans that do not include a wide range of services or participating practitioners;
3) the issue of practitioner participation has not been addressed. With reimbursements going down, fewer doctors will participate in a wide range of plans. We have what I would consider mid-tier coverage and once you get into something more serious than routine care, it can be very difficult to find a specialist who accepts your plan. We’ve even encountered specialists who have foregone participation in insurance plans altogether.
4) the issue of illegal immigrants siphoning off resources has not been addressed
5) nor does obamacare address the criminally high fees charged by many health care services and providers. Five minutes with a cardiologist should not cost $1500 (this happened to me, and it was 10 years ago, and not at an elite clinic).
6) this will hit the UMC hard as they won’t be eligible for subsidies, but aren’t rich enough for it not to hurt
7) it’s inevitable that this will railroad the country into socialized healthcare, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your vantage point. If they are going to *mandate* that people have coverage, they will eventually have to offer the ability to buy into medicaid, while the tentacles of government grow ever more intrusive and embedded in the lives of its citizens.
There are probably democrats out there who would agree with some of these points, but they would never disagree with their dear leader so are throwing their weight behind the legislation regardless.
islandmommy
September 26, 2013 at 10:23 AM
Here is what we need: NHS-style socialized medicine, with no private option whatsoever, and with outcome-based rationing. Sure, if you’re 90 years old, and hhopelessly senile, wearing adult diapers in the nursing home for the past decade and all, you might not be able to get that huge operation that might extend your life (such as it is) for a couple months at the cost of $200K, but all in all most people will benefit.
Peter
ironrailsironweights
September 26, 2013 at 12:33 PM
I agree. Of course if he or she can pay for that operation with own money it should be perfectly fine to do so.
Colmainen
September 26, 2013 at 1:41 PM
“Here is what we need: NHS-style socialized medicine, with no private option whatsoever…”
This message brought to you by the Medical Tourism Association of Baja California. Come visit our new, modern clinics with the latest equipment, English speaking doctors from San Diego, and young, muy caliente nurses.
Sgt. Joe Friday
September 26, 2013 at 2:06 PM
So what? If the oldsters want to be treated in Mexico, just go.
Colmainen
September 27, 2013 at 1:08 PM
The Individual Mandate gives the government the right to make you buy anything they want you to buy for any, or no, reason.
“To shore up the auto-industry, all Americans will be required to purchase a car from Ford, GM, or Chrysler between 2008-2010, or until sales reach 2006 levels. Americans need to take personal responsibility for their transportation, and stop literally free-riding on buses. If you don’t buy an American car you’ll just pay a $10K penalty-tax.”
dsgntd_plyr
September 26, 2013 at 7:10 PM
“We make people buy car insurance. How is making people buy another type of insurance more unprecedented?”
We make people buy (car) liability insurance, not as an absolute mandate, but attached to driving a car on public roads, to cover the risks that creates for OTHER people. (A few states have a no-fault system that does the same thing in a slightly this around, but that’s an exception. We don’t make them buy comprehensive policies. Some people do that, others self-insure.
The medical equivalent of mandatory car liability insurance would be nothing like Obamacare. It would be insurance that only covers diseases or injuries you give to other people.
Anonymous
September 26, 2013 at 7:43 PM
Is there just one level of care under Obamacare?
CamelCaseRob
September 26, 2013 at 9:42 PM
All of you are missing a very important point. Why are Democrats suddenly so concerned about the costs of healthcare when they are never concerned about costs in every other context?
map
September 26, 2013 at 10:16 PM
Healthcare takes up a very large part of the economy like 17% of GDP. If it keeps going up in terms of cost and the share of the economy, it will crowd everything out. For someone who wants to maintain a welfare state or any kind of state, keeping costs down is essential.
r
September 27, 2013 at 7:29 AM
Democrats have always been concerned about the cost of necessities for the poor.
CamelCaseRob
September 27, 2013 at 1:22 PM
I’m in NY where insurance will be sold on the state level. They already have an excel file you can download, punch a few numbers in, and see what will be available to you. My wife and I can look forward to paying $660-900/month (about 25-50% more than we do now) for insurance with average coverage.
By the way, we are in our early-mid 30s and have a $500/month minimum payment on our (fairly average amount of) student debt.
These two payments swallow up a quarter of our take-home pay. They have had a MAJOR impact on the type of home, vehicles, etc. we’ve purchased, how much we’ve saved/invested, etc. We’re doing well enough, but we’d be kicking all kinds of ass if that $1,300 wasn’t being pumped into our increasingly useless school system and/or health care subsidies for less productive people.
By the way, our combined income is 91k. It’s good for our area, but in the big picture, it’s nothing. Yet we qualify for NO subsidy whatsoever. Not even a marginal reduction. We pay full price. Tell me again, how this is going to appeal to the middle class?
My entire generation is being hobbled (not that student debt wasn’t a problem before we came along…it just got out of control when we were borrowing). Our purchasing/investing/saving power is being neutered while help is thrown at people who are hopeless to ever truly contribute to the economy.
Think about it this way. You have 30k. You can spend it on phones for 700 people whose general condition will never change appreciably because of it, or you can give to to a guy for whom it represents the difference between building a home in a nice neighborhood and continuing to rent. Emotions aside, which would truly be better for America? I think it’s pretty obvious. Home construction has an outstanding, far-rippling economic effect.
It’s bad enough that good, solidly middle class jobs are disappearing. Even those of us who find them are crippled by the debt we had to pile up to become qualified for them. As well as this health care stuff.
rbgeorge
September 27, 2013 at 8:20 AM
You can simply not buy insurance, and if you get really sick, you will be allowed to buy any insurance you want for the regular price because the insurance companies will no longer be allowed to ban you for having a pre-existing condition.
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 27, 2013 at 2:50 PM
Just don’t get really sick in January because you will have to wait a year to sign up.
Sticking it to 20 and 30 year old in OC was unnecessary and frankly was a big “up yours” to the young folk who I guess don’t vote enough in Congressional elections. There was no need to create yet another intergenerational transfer in order to accomplish the stated goals of health care reform. You could have a mandate and no exclusion on preexisting conditions with properly age rated and/or sex rated policies, and you would probably end up with MORE universal coverage because more people would sign up. I guess that would have required more on-budget subsidies though, instead of the off-budget subsidy of rediculous prices for healthy young people.
Anonymous
September 27, 2013 at 11:32 PM