I think you're the one who is impaired.
Regardless of the carping, the points raised against your view are valid and cogent and you have not answered any of them.
So far, I have not seen anyone actually post any portion of the actual bill passed by the House in support of their claims that it's going to involve "death panels", or somehow ruin the U.S. economy.
In fact, much of what I see posted is outright falsehoods: some people initially posted in CBO estimates on the cost of health-insurance plans
for a typical family (I think it was for a typical family of four earning 75k or so - I don't remember), and the estimate was that such a family would spend 20% of health-care. The quote was pasted in without context, so we don't even know what year the CBO's estimate was for. And yet, that same poster then claimed that the House bill
mandates that a family earning that amount *must* pay 20%, and implied that it would be in the form of a tax, or some 20% out of your paycheck.
Arguments like that are not valid, no matter how cogently they're presented, because they're based on a falsehood.
The bill is a major restructuring of health care. Even though the language of the bill doesn't appear to say that, the actual effects will be dramatic, and disasterous.
That is
YOUR opinion, with which I respectfully disagree. If you can point out, logically, how and why it will be "disastrous", then please, explain it. You can't just claim something will be "disastrous", with zero evidence to back it up - or I guess I should say, you
can claim that, but it's just your opinion.
We will see high taxes. We will probably see people jailed for not having health care--a first! We will see employers making calculations of their present insurance premiums vs their penalty under the law and chucking their plans, leaving employees to fend for themselves.
This is clear to anyone who can think beyond Stage One.
First off - we're gonna see higher taxes whether this bill passes or not, and that's a simple fact. Our government has spent more money than it took in every single year since the year 2000. The total federally-owed debt is in the trillions, and only going up, and to be perfectly honest, I don't think this health-reform bill is going to make much of a difference either way. Even if it were to add, say, a TRILLION fracking dollars over the next ten years, that's about 1/5th of the total new debt that the last President added to pile during his 8-year term.
We're $10 Trillion in the hole. And from an economic point of view, having nearly universal coverage might actually *increase* tax revenues
without raising taxes, since people without health-insurance are less likely to be treated for simple infections, leading them to be fired, or miss work more than healthier people who get treatment. That lost productivity might be more than any cost to the government of the plan - I don't know either way, but then, I'm not pretending to know exactly what's going to happen, unlike some of the people arguing on this forum.
As for employers cutting health-insurance - they're already doing that in droves, as somebody else just pointed out. At least now there will be a penalty for dropping the insurance.
And finally, insurance companies can't just refuse to cover people for a pre-existing condition, which I think is sort of barbaric. I'm lucky - I've never spent a night in a hospital in my life (except the day I was born), never been really sick, and never been badly injured. But there's a lot of people who can't get insurance for something because of the pre-existing condition crap.
So - you might think I'm mentally impaired - that's your prerogative. But to say that people have posted valid and cogent arguments against the health-care bill? I don't think any of them has fracking
read any of it, or has a clue what's in it. And honestly - there
are problems with the bill, I know that.
It's not a particularly "great" piece of legislation, and I have no doubt it's got a ton of loop-holes, legalistic double-speak and useless crap in it. But - given the option between finally insuring millions of the poor, covering people with pre-existing conditions, and setting up a plan of last resort for people that no private insurer will help, because they're too sick - I'll take the bill, given what I know of it.
Do you have reading comprehension problems?
