Nationalized Health Care
1. "If you are one of the 45 million Americans who don’t have health insurance, you will have it after this plan becomes law."
2. "If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change for you under this plan is the amount of money you will spend on premiums. That will be less."
Is it wrong for me to find that statement 1 makes statement 2 misleading?
3. If you already have health insurance, you likely have a job that pays you enough to afford it, or your employer provides it.
4. If you fit either category in 3, you likely also pay taxes.
5. Taxes will pay for #1 and #2.
6. Corporations are not self-sacrificing for the greater good.
7. Based on 5. and 6, corporations will either find a loophole to get out of the tax burden, move out of the U.S., or take other measures to reduce expenditures to compensate for the change.
8. Based on 5 and 7, at least SOME of the tax burden will be passed on to tax payers. I find it highly unlikely that this will be paid solely by the upper class, considering the numbers you are dealing with on 1.
[Obama] will also challenge the medical system to...
Challenge. Any time I hear this I have to wonder where that can possibly go. This means that health care institutions will have to take the initiative to actually implement his challenge, and if they do, there will be an associated cost to implement. Last I checked, costs are paid with money, which again eventually is paid by... you can draw your own conclusions.
Reform Medical Malpractice:
Obama will strengthen antitrust laws to prevent insurers from overcharging physicians for their malpractice insurance and will promote new models for addressing errors that improve patient safety, strengthen the doctor-patient relationship and reduce the need for malpractice suits.
This on the surface sounds like a great idea. Malpractice suits are a huge drain on the health care system. The U.S. tends to be sue-happy, doctors do make mistakes, and insurance companies end up paying the bill. If there is not a change in actual malpractice suits but insurance companies are forced to change what they can charge for policies, they will be forced into bankruptcy. Reform of this nature would require the Judicial system to reform malpractice procedures. Last I checked, the President shouldn't have any influence on the Judicial system. You know, that whole thing about guaranteeing checks and balances of power in our government. Good idea? Absolutely. But the President actually should be the last person on earth to make the mentioned changes happen.
Obama
will invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records, and will phase in requirements for full implementation of health IT.
OMG, this is insane. I work in IT. My last job was as a software development manager, and we frequently worked with health care institutions to develop software that complied with HIPA and other regulations regarding healthcare IT. $10 billion dollars a year will not even scratch the surface of taking health care paperless on a national level. $10 billion dollars won't even cover the cost of the infrastructure investments necessary. This would mean that the costs would fall back to the health care institutions, meaning in the long run increase in health care costs. And that's all ignoring the fact that Obama is using $10 million of our dollars to begin with. I would laugh, but this is just too INSANE.
Economy
"I'm in this race to take those tax breaks away from companies that are moving jobs overseas and put them in the pockets of hard working Americans who deserve it."
Again, this is another great sentiment. At surface value, what sounds wrong with this statement? Put dollars back in our pockets, and hurt the big, bad corporations. The unfortunate truth about corporations is that they aren't going to selflessly bend over and take it from the government. They will naturally (in the purest free-market capitalist sense) attempt to find a way to offset this. And if we are talking specifically about corporations that off-shore labor... well, they already have a precedent set for cutting costs, don't they?
"And I won't raise the minimum wage every ten years - I will raise it to keep pace so that workers don't fall behind."
Yet again, another sentiment that sounds good. But if you know anything about macroeconomics, there are direct relationships and a delicate balancing act for the Fed (not the President, the Fed) between minimum wage and interest rates with the unemployment rate, inflation, and other economic stability indicators. Without careful consideration and control of the variables that we can control from the former, you can have devistating results from the latter. So the promise of raising the minimum wage alone doesn't say much to me about improving our economy, it just sounds like vote pandering.
Without having to quote every reference to Obama's plan for labor and unions, Obama's proposed approach is to make it easier for employee's to unionize, and put restrictions on the actions corporations can take in response. Again, in theory this sounds good. Unions historically have made many improvements for the workforce. Unions unnaturally affect the balance of supply and demand for labor; on the one hand you DO want to improve the lives of workers, but ALL workers. The flip side of Unionization is that demand for labor will go down, meaning that unemployment will go up, either though mass layoffs or simply disincentives to new businesses or business expansion. I simply would need to read more details about Obama's plan to somehow magically give Unions more power without some check in place to keep the labor market from becoming pressured in the direction of increased unemployment.
Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act: The FMLA covers only certain workers in businesses with 50 or more employees. Obama will expand it to cover businesses with 25 or more employees.
This change will put small-to-middle sized businesses at a huge disadvantage, where incidentally the negative affects of losing staff are felt much more harshly than in a larger corporations that has a larger labor base to absorb the effects of FMLA. Have you ever had a job where a co-worker had to go on leave? For an extended period of time? Did your life suck having to pick up the slack? You can bet small business employers feel it, too. This will serve to encourage small businesses to sell out to larger corporations due to competitive pressures and the hit to their already stressed bottom line.
Retirement Security
Obama plans to stop all efforts to privatize Social Security. This means increasing the Social Security tax. The plan proposes raising the cap on income that can be taxed by SS, I am sceptical to see how far that bar will have to be raised in order to make up the difference for a system that will continue to be drained by the aging baby-boomer generation. Will Obama have to concede his pledge to protect SS, or raise the percentage of the SS tax across the board? I'm not saying that the SS problem is easy to fix; I just think that it is irresponsible to make promises at a solution without a practical answer to how it will be funded. I don't see any "change" from past Presidential promises, from both parties, at solving the SS problem.
Restoring Fiscal Responsibility
Reinstate PAYGO Rules: Obama believes that a critical step in restoring fiscal discipline is enforcing pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budgeting rules which require new spending commitments or tax changes to be paid for bycuts to other programs or new revenue.
Will Obama's pay-as-you-go policy apply before, or after, all of the new policies mentioned in his plan? Just askin'.
"If you don't like it, you can shove it. But you don't like it; you LOVE it."
-- Rivers Cuomo, "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived", Weezer (the red album) |
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