+1 i thought he nailed it as well.
I was really hoping he’d say he was open to allowing insurance to be purchased across state lines, but nope 
That’s a stopgap that doesn’t address the problem at hand. Republicans use that as an excuse to avoid any actual cost savings. Supply and demand says if theres more demand for insurance in the cheaper states, they go up in price anyway.
I like how he spoke to Senior Citizens to reassure them they are safe, and I like how he explained the idea creating a competitive marketplace for people to buy insurance at reasonable rates.
Last week I was turned away from a VA hospital that did not have a single functioning x-ray machine. I was told if I wanted I could drive two hours away or call the next day to see if one of theirs was working yet. Universal Healthcare YAY! 
Hope you enjoy it.
Did you even watch the speech? :bloated:
THIS IS NOT CLOSE TO GOVERNMENT UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE.
I did watch it. Lots of things sound great in a speech and look great on paper. The fact that you think our govt is efficient enough to pull this off and not be a super $$$ pit and keep us competitive in innovative health care amazes me. Gotta fight for your agenda though I guess.
I just dont understand how people equate something covering 5% of the population with Canada’s system.
juat?
The public option would only cover 5% of the population at max and would be paid by premiums, not taxes. Yet people spout off like its socialized medicine.
Shit i missed it. cliffs?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/09/obama.speech/index.html
-People with current insurance that do not want to change anything won’t have to.
-Medicare won’t be touched
-Those who lie about it and spread misinformation will be called out. No death panels, no socialized medicine, no government takeover of health insurance companies, no government funded abortions, and illegal immigrants won’t be covered.
-Health insurance companies won’t be able to deny or cut your coverage because you’re sick
-Create national health insurance exchange to negotiate best prices
-Program is self-funded via cost savings
-Medical malpractice tort reform will be included
But he didn’t explain it any further.
If a business doesn’t provide health care for it’s employees, then they’d have to pay an 8% penalty ‘tax.’ But the problem is that 8% penalty is less than many businesses pay to provide employee health care right now. So if I have the choice to continue paying more to keep my employees on private insurance or take the 8% penalty, I’m going to take the 8% penalty. It simply costs me less.
So if I drop my employees health plan and pay the penalty because it costs me less, then my employees are forced onto to the public heath plan. And they don’t have a say in it. Sounds like they won’t be able to keep their health plan even it they like it.
Where am I going wrong? Am I missing a provision somewhere?
Businesses pay to provide employee care right now with a 0% penalty. They could drop it, tell them all to get Medicaid or Family Health Plus, and not get fined by the gov’t. Why would they suddenly drop it AND pay a penalty to do so?
If they dropped health insurance, unless they upped everyone’s wages by a corresponding amount, it’d be the same as cutting everyone’s salary by thousands. Their employees would quit. What this does is, for the shyster businesses that don’t offer their employees anything, they can either start, or start paying into the system that’s stuck supporting their employees on the house right now because of their greed.
Because paying the penalty that the bill mandates would cost less than paying for private insurance for their employees.
I found more clarification on the 8% figure here. I guess the Times was wrong, and it has different levels depending on how much the company makes.
But I’m not talking about the shyster that doesn’t offer his employees coverage right now, I’m talking about the ones that already do offer coverage who will be faced with a choice;
a) keep paying for the more expensive private insurance for their employees
or
b) drop the private insurance, pay the % penalty and let their employees fall back on the government plan.
There is also a tax credit in there that I was missing, so;
If [(cost of private insurance)-(tax credit)] > (% penalty for not offering employees insurance)
Then employees are going to pay the penalty and drop coverage.
In this process the employee has no say. He or she can’t make their employer go with the option that costs the most.
If anything this would seem to create more “shyster” employers kicking their employees out of the insurance they like and into the public option…?
I’d like to know where he got that 5% figure, and how if only 5% of the people use go that option how it would ever support itself on premiums alone.
Like others have said, it sounds great in a prepared speech. The problem is in the details of implementing and paying for it.
I found the part about how all the savings we’ll realize from the money being wasted on medicare will almost cover the cost of this program. Wait, JUAT? So the same government who is wasting billions in what he’s calling waste in medicare is going to run another health care program so efficiently it will save us money?
Onyx, your argument makes no sense. You still haven’t answered why if businesses were so keen on dropping health care they wouldn’t just do it now, FOR FREE? That’s like saying if we made cigarettes illegal, punishable by a fine, what’s to stop people from smoking because the fines weren’t stiff enough? Any penalty is better than no penalty.
5% of America is 15 million customers. I could see how that could be self-sustaining, especially with profit and bloated executive salaries out of the picture.
Some businesses don’t offer health care. Those that do offer it do so because they want to retain quality employees who might otherwise leave and move to a competitor or other job if they couldn’t get a health plan with their current employer.
But now with a public option, everyone is covered in some form regardless of who they work for. With that in mind, knowing that their employees would have something to fall back on combined with a net savings for doing so, employers might drop their current health plans. So if said employee likes his current health plan, but his employer won’t pay for it anymore, he can’t keep it.
I think if the businesses want to drop health care for people that currently have it and make them buy their own insurance, they’re going to do so regardless of whether they have to buy private or government insurance. Either way, that’s a douche move that should be taken up with the business, and isn’t the government’s fault. All the public option does is give them a layer of protection so that if their employer screwed them like that, they could buy their personal policy at a reasonable cost, instead of paying thousands extra that go toward some insurance executive’s Aston Martin or his summer home in the Hamptons.
If a company values its employees so little that they’d rather pay an 8% penalty AND forgo a tax break than give them decent benefits, the employees should leave on their own accord.