I've put the money line in this report in boldface:
The price tag is in: It would cost $400 billion to remake California’s health insurance marketplace and create a publicly funded universal heath care system, according to a state financial analysis released Monday.California would have to find an additional $200 billion per year, including in new tax revenues, to create a so-called “single-payer” system, the analysis by the Senate Appropriations Committee found. The estimate assumes the state would retain the existing $200 billion in local, state and federal funding it currently receives to offset the total $400 billion price tag.The cost analysis is seen as the biggest hurdle to creating a universal system, proposed by Sens. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, and Toni Atkins, D-San Diego.
Well, no shinola, Sherlock! There is not a school of economics left, right, up, down or inside out that has refuted the science's most basic law: The money has to come from somewhere.
So what happens to whatever multi-billions that folks now pay in premiums to the health insurance casinos that shun losses as much as the black jack table does a big winner? Seems to me it would just be a "redistribution." Gone are the insurance brokers and agents vying for "business" for their companies, gone are the swank Rose Bowl suites where the suits do their entertaining (lobbying), gone is the intercommunion with Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Gone as all the peoples' insurance dollars "redistributed" into the pockets of individual wealth strivers. Gone are the lobbysts and their golf outings. Into the risk pool goes everyone; those with losses are compensated. Those who are healthy will what? Envy the sick for their "pay day?"
ReplyDeleteThe money currently goes to private organizations - insurance companies - as opposed to the government. The difference is huge. The current model is a voluntary arrangement. Consumers making choices as free individuals to buy certain products from certain companies. Government, unless you're talking about socialism, is not designed to sell products. That's not its function.
ReplyDeleteLet's remember that we did not have a true free-market arrangement prior to the "A"CA. The big-shot lobbying that you refer to is the antithesis of it. No company or sector of the economy ought to be getting some kind of special leg up.
Finally, if the state analysis of the California proposal to go all the way to single payer already takes into account the elimination of administrative and marketing costs of private insurance companies, then we can see that it's a bust finance-wise on its own, and not because of that.
Re: government not being designed to sell products: it's also not designed to provide "services" for "free."
ReplyDeleteIt's not any more free than the premium you or an employer pays. If the states can run their own plans, let them. Move if it's your state. Let's see their stuff. Many states wait on CA to sink or swim.
ReplyDeleteYou prove my point. The government would use its monopoly on coercive power to take every citizen's money whether or not a given citizen wanted this "service."
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, under single payer, a person is going to have a compelling reason to "want" it, since it would be the only game in town.
I would argue differently, it is not a choice of single payer or market payee, it is somebody is going to pay. I would argue that before we upend an entire system of health care we look more closely whom may loose. I think it is the system of health care that looses. Is the system sustainable, the same question falls to tax cuts. A lot of medical business left out of the loop in this proposal, as are a lot of people paying into a system which unfairly provides similar benefits to the nearly uninsured.
ReplyDeleteIt seems those without insurance currently provide excellent income for those small rural hospitals, urban populations, never the less the system pays. I especially doubt that lobbing will much difference to this cash cow. Or, whom owns the largest proportion of commercial property in America, I think it is the Insurer's, after all the premiums never end. Reform sounds a lot better than lets start over.
Correction Lobbying and the Cash Cow of Insurance
ReplyDeleteSocial insurance is not socialism. Why aren't so-called "lesser" countries like Canada, Britain, et al hundred or so of them looking to the
ReplyDeleteexceptional" greatness of our shareholder value system to patch their peoples up? In America, aren't the people the government or at least by it and of it and for it? Things are way way skewed here and have been going that way for 40 years. Reagan was not a new beginning. He was an ending.
No, that fallacy needs to be put to rest forever. The people and the government are not synonymous terms.
ReplyDeleteOle Abe's by, of and for the people don't wash no more, huh?
ReplyDeleteMaybe it perished from this earth? So much for Honest Abe's shalt nots....
ReplyDeleteOf course , it's of, by and for the people. That doesn't make them one and the same. Government exists, per Madison's vision, to keep the country safe from attack by a foreign enemy, guarantee that people are safe from physical harm and theft, enforce contracts, and guarante their rights to free speech, freedom of worship and assembly, freedom to bear arms, and - well, that's about it. Maybe build some roads.
ReplyDeleteOther than that, government is supposed to leave people alone.
That's what made the Progressives of a hundred years ago so poisonous. They strove - unfortunately quite successfully- to change society's very notion of the role and function of government
ReplyDeleteYep, something called the democratic process as expounded by the courts of this great and exceptional land that rules by law, not men, not even a James Madison. Remember Marbury?
ReplyDeleteBut if you go messing with the basic original conception of what government is supposed to be for - and, perhaps more importantly, what it's not supposed to be for - freedom is eroded and this is no longer the United States of America.
ReplyDeleteVery principled, my dear bloggie, So far, all the socialism we got has been tested in the courts. But I know you see dominoes. Simple fact is: all your principles pretty much start with tax revolt. Guns are fine, but butter is for the crème de la crème.
ReplyDeleteDid not James Madison have a few issues concerning his interest of certain property?
ReplyDeleteWhether bad and un-American ideas get "tested in the courts" is hardly the point. In order to wind one's way through matters of policy and law, one has to start with a core understanding of what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad.
ReplyDeleteAnd I guess saying my principles "pretty much start with tax revolt" is actually pretty accurate. As I've said many times, government ought to have to puke all over itself to justify taking the first red cent of a citizen's money.
Yes, guns are fine. Keeping the nation safe from attack by enemies is government's primary function.
Michael, I guess I need "a few issues" and "certain property" spelled out for me.
ReplyDeleteLet us be clear, though, that whatever you're referring to does not reflect one way or the other on the principles he set forth in his Federalist essays, the Constitution itself, or his other writings, or that guided him as president.
Michael, please elaborate on what "interests of certain property" means. I am not familiar of any interests of anything unless they be provisional,say as in the interests of saving face.
ReplyDeleteMadison
ReplyDeleteThomas Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, would have to deal with the repercussions of Aaron Burr's conspiracy. Burr had enlisted the help of the general of the Army, James Wilkinson, to supply U.S. Army troops to achieve his goals. Though it was known that Wilkinson was corrupt and had even attempted to get Kentucky to secede from the union, Jefferson kept him on in his position as military governor of Louisiana in order to secure Republican votes in Wilkinson’s home state of Pennsylvania.
Madison, for the same reasons as Jefferson, chose to keep Wilkinson on, even after a two-year congressional investigation about the man. It was only after reports of heavy-handed abuses of power and his inept handling of military affairs that Madison order Wilkinson court-martialed, which found Wilkinson not guilty. It eventually took disastrous military campaigns during the War of 1812 before Wilkinson was removed.
Thanks for the clarification.
ReplyDelete