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Originally Posted by Clak I know you're not seriously asking, but still, look who you're asking here.

I actually am seriously asking, I think most folks want to do the right thing.

Originally Posted by camoor So you believe that if working folks get sick, they don't deserve the care they need to get better. You believe they deserve to die.

Let's just say that I have a lot of respect for people who have the difficult job of working out the statistical value of a life and things along those lines. If resources were infinite, we would not need them.

In any case, the burden will not be shouldered by the small business owner, who can neither afford to pay the penalty or provide the insurance. It will fall on the government, and taxpayers, to insure those who may lose their jobs as the labor market adjusts to the new regulations. The best way to mitigate this, I think, is to cut payroll taxes. I prefer mandated benefits over payroll taxes, generally speaking. As long as the worker places some value on the mandated benefits, it is more efficient than the payroll tax.

Originally Posted by slidecage Seems noone wants to answer the question How is this good when before i was making 25,000 with health care and now my Company dropped my heath care meaning im going to have to go buy it for 3,000 (good luck finding it for a family for 3000 a year) now im only making 22,000 so how is this helping .

The obvious answer is if your company was already providing insurance to its employees before ObamaCare, then why would they choose to no longer offer the insurance after the fact. Your question doesn't make any sense. Certain companies offer benefits in an attempt to get better workers.

Originally Posted by camoor I actually am seriously asking, I think most folks want to do the right thing.

"The right thing" is subjective. Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. Mitt Romney thinks he's righteous as , do you? Do you really think that any answer that comes out of Spokker's brain is going to be what you'd consider morally right?

Originally Posted by Spokker Let's just say that I have a lot of respect for people who have the difficult job of working out the statistical value of a life and things along those lines. If resources were infinite, we would not need them. In any case, the burden will not be shouldered by the small business owner, who can neither afford to pay the penalty or provide the insurance. It will fall on the government, and taxpayers, to insure those who may lose their jobs as the labor market adjusts to the new regulations. The best way to mitigate this, I think, is to cut payroll taxes. I prefer mandated benefits over payroll taxes, generally speaking. As long as the worker places some value on the mandated benefits, it is more efficient than the payroll tax.

Your respect is misplaced. Capitalism is ruthlessly efficient, anyone who has a heart would be axed for the guy who can bring in more profits.

The solution is to pay working folks a living wage instead of the unsustainable situation we're in now where we continue to widening gap between the superrich and the poor.

That's a pipe dream but I can still celebrate the little victories like the passage of Obamacare.

Originally Posted by Clak "The right thing" is subjective. Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. Mitt Romney thinks he's righteous as , do you? Do you really think that any answer that comes out of Spokker's brain is going to be what you'd consider morally right?

Spokker is being honest and I appreciate that. I may disagree but I give him credit for laying his beliefs on the table instead of hiding behind rhetoric.

Originally Posted by slidecage Ya GE makes a million bucks they did it by ripping people off but when TIGER WOODS makes a million bucks playing a stupid game He earned it.

GE DOESN'T PAY TAXES. NEITHER DOES ANY OTHER COMPANY OF THAT SIZE.

Originally Posted by slidecage but like i said 90% of the people think this means FREE HEALTHCARE and they will vote for him to stay as prez.

Originally Posted by mykevermin I will not disagree with anyone who wants to argue that Washington is more than happy to put party politics aside and move us further into an Oligarchy to the point that it's almost more accurate to call it a Kakistocracy. But when we acknowledge the extent to which monied interests interfere with and control the shape and direction of our policies, the weaker become any claims of "socialism." Or, hell, even "liberalism."

On a certain level, Obamacare masquerades as socialism. I'm sure there are some supporters out there who think it means free health care. Likewise there are probably those on the right who hate it because its "free health care/socialism". Of course these people don't see the bill through reality, and thus think, "socialism". The reality is of course that there is no free health care. Even if you make 15-20k a year you're paying a large chunk of money for insurance. (I don't know about you guys, but here in Minnesota Medicaid costs money.) There is no mythical socialism (which I suppose would be Medicare for all) but rather another instance of corporatism.

Originally Posted by chiwii Let's say that the bill wasn't passed. The company has the choice to pay $8,000 a year for an employee's health insurance, or pay $0 for the employee's health insurance and let the employee find their own insurance. Why would they even offer it at all? They offer health insurance to attract good employees. The law doesn't change that. It does encourage employers that previously did not offer health insurance benefits to start doing so.

But as we know, many companies love to cut costs. An easy way to do this under the bill is to pay the $2,000 fine and dump your workers onto a state-exchange. You aren't harming them in any way, as they still have health care. And now the government gets to subsidize it. How fun. (This works very well for new businesses too. They can just decide never to offer health care.)

Not necessarily. The penalty might increase the cost of hiring, which would reduce the the amount of labor demanded. Many jobs don't "deserve," for lack of a better word, health benefits. These are often part-time, menial jobs.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM GUYS!

Oh, and to the guy who asked if prices were supposed to go down with the bill, well it depends. If you require people to buy health care from a private company and there are no safe guards, its can raise prices as there is now a forced demand, and those guys control the supply. Also, just remember that there's gonna be cuts in Medicare payments to pay for the law, (thus making Medicare even less economically friendly for care providers.) And, there's not gonna be any negotiation of drug prices, so there's another monopoly economy.

Originally Posted by slidecage the POINT IS THIS everyone says O this is going to be so freaking great ... the truth is the rates are going to go up so The company person a is working right now PERSON A works at a company that give them health care the company can either GIVE Them health care at 5,000 per pop or pay 1,000 per pop fine so they pick the fine... The person can find heath care on their own but will cost them 3,000 bucks SO the person who was making 25,000 before NOW only makes 22,000 cause they have to buy their own health care so what makes this so great the simple point is NOTHING Cause the fools who are so happy about this think they are getting FREE HEALTH CARE then again everything else to them is free so why shouldnt they think this is going to be free as well if you think your rates are not going to go up your a fool.... if someone never paid a penny into the health care system and then goes out and buys it for 3000 a year and turns around and goes i need a 100,000 in health care and pills where the hell do you think that other 97,000 is going to come from... THE OTHER PEOPLES BILLS GOING UP TO COVER THEM.

So you are arguing a hypothetical person in a position that has health insurance but will lose it because of the law? Why in the world would a company suddenly stop providing the benefit? It makes no sense as the only reason for benefits is to retain employees that you need. If they are highly skilled and your competitor has health insurance then you must also have insurance. This law changes nothing for this person. Any true capitalist would know this.

I could make up any number of hypothetical people but what's the point? It's not real.

Originally Posted by Spokker Whether the company or the employee pays for health care, it has the same effect on the labor market. This is similar to payroll taxes. It doesn't matter if the employer or the employee pays it. That the worker pays half of the payroll taxes and the company pays half is immaterial to the effect it has on the supply and demand of labor. Mandated benefits work in a similar way, but can have less severe effects than payroll taxes if certain conditions are met. Of course, this assumes mandated benefits in lieu of payroll taxes. It would probably be better to simply get the $8,000 added to your salary for you to spend as you please, either on health insurance, something else or some combination or the two, but workers like the idea of "benefits." You should probably be indifferent, however, between a job that pays $60k with $8k worth of benefits and a job that pays $68k with no benefits.

Before this law was passed, there was a signifcant difference between receiving health insurance through an employer that offered a group plan, or receiving extra pay to purchase your own plan - HIPAA. This law restricts pre-existing exclusions for group plan participants.

Originally Posted by Spokker Not necessarily. The penalty might increase the cost of hiring, which would reduce the the amount of labor demanded. Many jobs don't "deserve," for lack of a better word, health benefits. These are often part-time, menial jobs. There may be less of them, which would hurt the poorest, lowest skilled workers. The only way to mitigate this is if health care costs go down overall. However, extending any amount of health care in jobs that previously offered zero benefits will still raise the cost of labor. So a restaurant may start offering health insurance to all employees if they are required to do so but may also get rid of a few employees to pay for it. Any increased costs will be passed on to the consumer, which may have effects throughout the industry. If consumers decide they do not want to pay, restaurants will close, resulting in lost jobs anyway. Or employment may stay the same while wages go down, unless wages are already at the minimum wage. I don't think it'll have much effect on salaried professionals, who probably won't lose their plans for the reason you stated, to retain talent.

So, what should be done with the people who don't "deserve" health insurance? They certainly can't afford to pay for it themselves. Maybe we should expand Medicaid? The new law already does that - should it go further? How will we pay for it?

Originally Posted by camoor Your respect is misplaced. Capitalism is ruthlessly efficient, anyone who has a heart would be axed for the guy who can bring in more profits.

Ordinary, everyday people do the same thing, that is, put a value on human life. We can estimate what that value is through revealed preference. A highway widening project, for example, will allow higher speeds. But this will lead to more fatal accidents. By comparing the value of the time saved to the increase in fatal accidents, we can come up with an approximate figure for how much society values a statistical life.

The solution is to pay working folks a living wage instead of the unsustainable situation we're in now where we continue to widening gap between the superrich and the poor.

The manager doesn't want to pay a living wage. How will you compel her to do it?

Originally Posted by chiwii So, what should be done with the people who don't "deserve" health insurance? They certainly can't afford to pay for it themselves. Maybe we should expand Medicaid? The new law already does that - should it go further? How will we pay for it?

If we desire for them to have health benefits, the government will pay if the business owner will not or cannot (unless we are going to penalize businesses for layoffs), and this will likely be paid for by either tax increases, borrowing or a combination of both.

If the overall cost of health care goes down, then great. It all depends on what the net effect is. The mandate is supposed to increase the risk pool, which is expected to lower premiums. Then there are all these other things that would be expected to increase costs. At the end of the day, do we come out even, better off, worse off? That's the big question.

Originally Posted by Spokker Ordinary, everyday people do the same thing, that is, put a value on human life. We can estimate what that value is through revealed preference. A highway widening project, for example, will allow higher speeds. But this will lead to more fatal accidents. By comparing the value of the time saved to the increase in fatal accidents, we can come up with an approximate figure for how much society values a statistical life.

I'm not going to continue to argue with someone whose evidence was lifted off of Fight Club.

Originally Posted by Spokker The manager doesn't want to pay a living wage. How will you compel her to do it?

This bill seems like a good start.

Originally Posted by Clak Peele could have saved himself time if he'd just written "People in this country are stupid". Look as this forum alone, proof and evidence be dammed, it means nothing to most people. It isn't even an issue of addiction like he claims, it's just simply that people get scared of things and when they do, they ignore evidence. Evidence may show that getting a prostate exam would do no good for a man, but then he reads or sees something on TV about it, gets sacred, and he's in the office the next day getting the exam.

I don't think it's a matter of just being stupid, but rather a lack of internal and external support systems and coping skills coupled with a lack of a realistic view of what medicine can and cannot offer.

We may use prostate cancer screening as the prototype. The average person often tells me: "don't we want to find something early so that we can do something about it." This is a rational point of view. Unfortunately, our screening tests (digital rectal exam and prostate specific antigen) are rather limited and we run into the issue of whether certain conditions are best left untreated. Many males will develop prostate cancer in their lifetime; for most of these males, this diagnosis would likely lead to nothing more than potentially a curiosity at autopsy. Many cases of prostate cancer are very slow growing and don't cause problems in life. Sure, we may detect such cases and then treat them... success is very easy to achieve since we are often doing what amounts to squashing a harmless gnat with a hammer. In the process, men may develop impotence, incontinence, and other side effects. However, both the the patient and the doctor are happy because they defeated cancer (albeit in many cases an inconsequential cancer). On the flip side, we have men who present in their 40s or 50s with a PSA of 800, anemia, and widely metastatic prostate cancer... they were unfortunate enough to have a very aggressive form of prostate cancer that is fast growing and for which no routine screening will be beneficial either due to the fast growth.... so the conundrum with prostate cancer is that we can often treat the slow growing and likely inconsequential lesions and cannot really do anything significant against the aggressive forms (aside from a crapload of ketoconazole and various other methods of androgen deprivation).

There are many other such examples in medicine and, in general, our attempts to screen for disease have been either failures or less effective than we thought... the one exception is colon cancer screening... so get your stool cards, sigmoidoscopies, or colonoscopies done after 50 assuming normal baseline risk

With regard to the coping skills equation, many people now present with conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, restless leg syndrome, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, etc... all of which are mainly manifestations of how stimuli are processed by the CNS, rather than peripheral lesions. People often have secondary gain from playing the sick role or simply need some issue to blame for their deficiencies. Medical practitioners are happy to oblige as this justifies their existence and gives them something to bill for...

Originally Posted by camoor I'm not going to continue to argue with someone whose evidence was lifted off of Fight Club.

My source was the book Labor Economics by George Borjas. The conclusion reached by the study was that states "took actions that indicated their willingness to accept one additional fatality because it would save around $1.5 million (in 1997 dollars) in travel costs."

It was a speed limit thing. Higher speed limits equal higher fatality rates, which is known and states were warned about this. We as a society basically say, okay, we are willing to accept this additional carnage on the road in exchange for the ability to go faster. It may be a funny thing to ask, but what is the optimal amount of road deaths? It's not zero. That would mean no driving

Originally Posted by camoor This bill seems like a good start.

The goal should be to prevent adverse incentives and a bloated bureaucracy. If our desire is to help the poor, it makes no sense to stifle business. Not every business is equally capable of providing a mandated insurance benefit, or a mandated living wage, or whatever. They are going to respond by continuing to reduce their total cost of labor. And if they can't do that, they'll go out of business.

Get away from the idea of living wage and toward the idea of basic income described here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/business/23scene.html

As always, Mr. Friedman’s policy prescriptions were shaped by his desire to minimize adverse economic incentives, a feature that architects of earlier welfare programs had largely ignored. Those programs, each administered by a separate bureaucracy, typically reduced a family’s benefits by some fraction of each increment in earned income. Rates of 50 percent were common, so a family participating in four separate programs might see its total benefits fall by $2 for each extra dollar it earned. Under the circumstances, no formal training in economics was necessary to see that working didn’t pay. In contrast, someone who worked additional hours under Mr. Friedman’s plan would always take home additional after-tax income.

Getting rid of traditional welfare programs, food stamps, Healthy Families, First 5, transit fare subsidies, affordable housing, minimum wage, etc., and replacing them for a basic income is far more efficient.

The Earned Income Tax Credit is similar to Friedman's proposal, the difference being that you only get the EITC if you work and your payment is much larger if you have at least one child. I would expand this program, which is already administered by the IRS, and cut all the other bloated, wasteful programs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3d7YKAeLWc

Sure, giving someone thousands of dollars for doing nothing is going to perverse incentives, but the argument is that it is the least harmful and most efficient out of all of the welfare schemes if our desire is to help the poor.

Originally Posted by camoor I'm not going to continue to argue with someone whose evidence was lifted off of Fight Club. This bill seems like a good start.

Spokker is a shitty caricature of himself.

I wonder what he does for a living, I would guess he has a side job posting on websites (those jobs exist) but too many people seem to do it for fun.

Originally Posted by Spokker My source was the book Labor Economics by George Borjas. The conclusion reached by the study was that states "took actions that indicated their willingness to accept one additional fatality because it would save around $1.5 million (in 1997 dollars) in travel costs." It was a speed limit thing. Higher speed limits equal higher fatality rates, which is known and states were warned about this. We as a society basically say, okay, we are willing to accept this additional carnage on the road in exchange for the ability to go faster. It may be a funny thing to ask, but what is the optimal amount of road deaths? It's not zero. That would mean no driving

I read some about Borjas. Seems like he is a Cuban immigrant who is anti-immigration. Nice consistency there.

Originally Posted by Msut77 Spokker is a shitty caricature of himself. I wonder what he does for a living, I would guess he has a side job posting on websites (those jobs exist) but too many people seem to do it for fun.

Yeah but at least he is being real. Spokker is not pretending to be a Christian or a humanitarian, he is openly admitting that he believes poor people who get sick deserve to die.

Spokker - I would imagine that you think of yourself as a good moral person, right? I would be intensely curious to know why. Beyond 'capitalism is a good unto itself' there doesn't seem to be much to your personal moral philosophy.

Originally Posted by camoor he is openly admitting that he believes poor people who get sick deserve to die.

I'm advocating for a basic income

Originally Posted by Spokker I'm advocating for a basic income

Are you trolling us? How is this even remotely libertarian or effectively different from those programs you think should be eliminated when basic income would require far more funding that those programs currently "enjoy" now? Or is your real point about a flat tax?