Oh, THAT'S what the requirement to buy insurance is for! Suddenly the things I've been reading make much more sense.
I hypothesize that there is no reason to create a government plan that's the same as private plans, so the interesting part of the health care debate is in how the government plan is different than a private plan.
So far, I've seen two proposals for how it can be different: The one Obama promised us in the campaign that convinced me to vote for him even after he lost my buy-in on Iraq was the redistributive plan I talked about before where the thing that's different is that the costs are offset by wealthier people playing more.
The other way in which it could be different, the way it sounds like congress is thinking of going, is that the government could mandate an unnatural risk-pool with healthy people paying to offset the cost of providing care to unhealthy people.
Both of those approaches involve powers not available to private industry which means both of them constitute, "not fair." The conservatives are right about this.
I've noticed a common theme when people of different political backgrounds talk about things: each side thinks the other side is stupid and/or not listening. Maybe the conservatives are frustrated with us because they keep telling us how unfair this thing is and we don't seem to be absorbing that fact. I think the more productive approach is to concede that point because it's fairly sound; the government really does have more options than private corporations and it can make a thing they can't. It's not fair. Then we can talk about what it costs us to do a thing that isn't fair vs. what it gets us to have public health insurance and the debate can move forward again.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2009-09-10 19:41 (UTC)I hypothesize that there is no reason to create a government plan that's the same as private plans, so the interesting part of the health care debate is in how the government plan is different than a private plan.
So far, I've seen two proposals for how it can be different: The one Obama promised us in the campaign that convinced me to vote for him even after he lost my buy-in on Iraq was the redistributive plan I talked about before where the thing that's different is that the costs are offset by wealthier people playing more.
The other way in which it could be different, the way it sounds like congress is thinking of going, is that the government could mandate an unnatural risk-pool with healthy people paying to offset the cost of providing care to unhealthy people.
Both of those approaches involve powers not available to private industry which means both of them constitute, "not fair." The conservatives are right about this.
I've noticed a common theme when people of different political backgrounds talk about things: each side thinks the other side is stupid and/or not listening. Maybe the conservatives are frustrated with us because they keep telling us how unfair this thing is and we don't seem to be absorbing that fact. I think the more productive approach is to concede that point because it's fairly sound; the government really does have more options than private corporations and it can make a thing they can't. It's not fair. Then we can talk about what it costs us to do a thing that isn't fair vs. what it gets us to have public health insurance and the debate can move forward again.