"... to those rising food prices, falling employment numbers and spiking health care premiums, things are going great!"
That's what Paul Krugman thinks he is going to try and sell and that his upcoming "trust me over your lyin' eyes" tour is going to fall flat.
You can read his analysis for yourself here.
Free Drinker Versus Free Thinker
26 minutes ago
3 comments:
You have to take Krugman with a grain or two of salt. He certainly does get some things right
For those who haven’t been keeping up: The Affordable Care Act requires that health insurance companies offer the same policies to everyone, with no discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. It also provides significant subsidies to help people pay insurance premiums — specifically, limiting the amount families have to pay out of pocket as a percentage of their income — with the subsidies on a sliding scale based on income. These subsidies have an important secondary benefit: They encourage even healthy people to buy insurance, which improves the risk pool and therefore holds overall premiums down.
Mandatory disclaimer for liberals: Yes, it would be much simpler just to have single-payer healthcare, paid for with progressive taxes. But that wasn’t politically possible when Obamacare was created, and it still isn’t. Obamacare was more or less the best we could get.
Single payer would be more efficient and I am not a liberal.
Of course, the Average American Idiot is fixated on Making it Big Some Day and then Keeping it All. So he pays for kids' schools and fire and police with taxes, but plays Vegas with healthcare (newsflash: the house always wins, and Vegas pays off better than United Healthcare) unlike the average European. AE pays horrendous taxes, but college, childcare and healthcare are there "free". We Americans are SO much better off, with our techbros and billionaires skating out of taxes, and our rugged individuals citizens getting the shaft.
The simple fact is single payer would immediately effectively destroy a huge service industry, and for that reason alone the amount of money that industry pours into buying politicians is incredible. We would effectively have to Nationalize all health care insurers, and there rationalize and combine their systems…massive savings, but also massive job losses. Which is exactly why our current health system consumes so much and produces so little.
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