There's no need. REAL men's underwear don't ever get GUI!

/ducks

You meant "recursive"; apparently it's recursive.

And at least with a stranger, you know that you don't know.

Shenanigans.

Come and get it, motherfucker. :)

And if they want a job when they graduate, you have to spend $40k a year.

/currently living this

On top of that, the health insurance companies also fund the Chamber of Commerce, which tried like hell to kill reform.

Tort reform is not a solution in itself. It's a small piece of a bigger problem. It can help, but results of (e.g.) Texas's reform are mixed.

Restricting competition across state lines is done because we want to avoid a race to the bottom on consumer protections and other 'mandatory coverage' rules that benefit us collectively--and those are mostly there at the state level. They're there so that, for example, some right-wing nutjob can't claim religion as a reason to avoid letting his daughter see an ob/gyn (say, to get birth control)--or perhaps a better example, he can't claim it as a reason to avoid covering his *employees'* daughters. Since most people get their health coverage through employers, they serve as a way to insulate individual employees from moralistic assertions by their employers.

And as to what constitutes a race to the bottom, well, see what happened with credit card deregulation: now all of the CC companies are in South Dakota because SD happens to have the fewest consumer protection regulations re: spontaneous rate increases, etc. Or at least they did until the CC Holder's Bill of Rights went into effect last month. I certainly don't want all the health insurance co's moving to the place where they're the least regulated and applying those standards to all of us. If individual states have legislated what their citizens feel ought to be included at a minimum, who are these corporations to circumvent that?

American is a nationality. Socialism is an ideology. The two are not mutually exclusive. I am an American socialist.

Besides, do you object to our socialist police force, our socialist fire department, our socialist postal service, our socialist military, our socialist public education system, our socialist health regulatory agencies (which make decisions for us about what food is safe to eat and water is safe to drink and which drugs are safe to take)? How about our socialist public roads? Or our socialist health insurance program for seniors? What about our socialist unemployment insurance?

Last I heard, those were all American. And last I heard, most Americans liked them.

Damnant quod non intellegunt.

Because the regulation necessitates a mandate which necessitates subsidies, which you'd know if you finished reading my first post.

And from this it is clear that you stopped reading my post at that point. Keep reading.

But to counter your point nonetheless, if, say, you're born diabetic, that's a preexisting condition. You can have a preexisting condition before you're old enough to know what insurance is. And the insurance companies can fuck you over for life. And then you die.

As for the cost of insurance getting higher for everyone else, that's not true either in the current context. You're equally forcing those who are healthy to have insurance and widening the risk pool. The bill, as it stands, will likely have a negligible impact on (unsubsidized) premiums.

Actually, I am. See my other posts in this same thread, wherein I used that point in different words. :)

I'm in agreement with you for the most part--I do think we could do better, however, by implementing some controls on payment mechanisms--namely, restricting pay-for-procedure medicine and paying doctors for outcomes, like Mayo does.

...which completely ignores the value of having insurance.

Except for the part where they're now forced to cover the sick and spend that money on healthcare rather than profits. We're telling them they can't drop people and they have to cover everyone, even when they get sick. This will cut into their profit margins, not help them (see the article I linked about Assurant making $150 million based on dropping everyone with HIV). While it may increase their absolute profits, as a percentage of revenues it will go down.

As I posted below, this forces a change in their business model, to actually *competing* for their customers, and actually working to deliver services more efficiently and with higher quality, instead of just making their risk pool better by weeding out the stragglers.

I agree that there could/should be more oversight in the cost structure, but as it is that authority is granted to the Secretary of HHS, in conjunction with the states, in the reconciliation bill.

While I don't have the free processor cycles at the moment to go through every point you've raised, the one thing that sticks out at me as off-track is this:

If you read my reply to a post below this one on the same thread, I linked an article about an insurance company (Assurant, formerly Fortis) revoking policies on anyone who had HIV. They made $150 million off of this arrangement. By disallowing this practice in the future, we are certainly not rewarding them--we're forcing them to change their business model from "let's cover the fewest sick people we can and leave them for our competitors" to "let's provide the best coverage at the least cost so people want to buy from us instead of our competitors". This also explains why they're funneling money to the Chamber of Commerce to undermine reform at the same time they're publicly declaring that they're open to it.

Basically, the assertion you're hiding in here is that people who are uninsured are uninsured by choice. And at the same time, you're asking why half of them still don't get coverage, even after subsidy. My answer is that the remainder are people who still fall through the cracks--as people who can afford it will be required to be covered under this legislation, those remaining uninsured likely fall under the "financial hardship" exemption.

In short, I don't buy said assertion: I don't believe that most uninsured are uninsured by irresponsibility. Given the pre-existing condition clauses and rescission policies, anyone who gets sick and is dropped (either because of rescission or because they've lost their job) can no longer be covered anywhere. While there are the young twentysomethings who think they're bulletproof, those aren't the ones likely to get sick. And now they'll be in the risk pool and drive down costs for everyone else.

Because it's a law, written in legalese, that incorporates simple regulatory changes, as I mentioned, and then makes a whole bunch more tangentially-related changes in order to pay for itself. The rest is trimming around the edges.

If you condense it from the large font, huge-margin, triple-spaced nature into something we're more used to (like, say, a book) it ends up being about 500 pages. And much of that is references to other clauses in other laws that it supersedes.