Health Care Reform

This is such an important topic, I wanted to share with you, something a little off our usual topic.

I'm not sure what you know or think you know about the current so-called healthcare reform legislation known as HR 3200. If you think that socialized medicine is the way to go, then that's your opinion. However, if you think that this bill is not socialized medicine, I respectfully beg to differ--and that's the entire point of this post.

HR 3200 will bring about socialized government run medicine in the United States. You will get the same shameful care that our returning heroes get at the VA. Know someone with Medicare or Medicaid? That will look like a walk in the park. Except now everyone will get it, except for members of Congress and the very rich.

The democrats and even Obama (depending on the day) are flip-flopping on whether this is a public option. Let me be perfectly clear: Any public option in this plan will lead to socialized medicine. Why?

A slippery slope in HR3200 as it stands makes it mandatory that all employers must offer the public option or pay 8% payroll tax (for companies with total payroll 400k +).

Giving insurance to all minimum wage workers would be great. However, look at it this way. Under HR3200, all minimum wage workers will be put into the government plan. Why?

If I pay someone $10 (we'll round up from minimum wage) and they work full time, they get paid $20,800 per year. My choices as an employer are to add them to our company insurance (mine is $10k this year) or pay $1,664 per year for them to be in the public option. What do you think the major low-paying employers like public schools, McDonalds, Wal Mart et al will do?

If you're a public school teacher and you make $30k per year, do you think your school district is going to give you the plan that costs $10,000 or $2,400 (a difference of 4x)?

What would you do as an employer? Pay $10,000 or $1,664 for each minimum wage employee?

So don't let anyone tell you that this isn't socialized medicine. Any public option = socialized medicine by default.

Again both parties have their share of the blame. There are dozens of bills in congress that are more balanced (like Coburn's Patients First Act), but the democrats won't let them out of committee. The flip side is the republicans had a majority for 6 years and never brought anything up.