Easy. 2% tax hike on the highest earners. Roll back military spending from a trillion dollars to a mere 400 billion pre 9/11 levels. You can pay for five of those bills from doing just that.
The fact that there are ways to pay for this health care bill (and I disagree with your suggestion) doesn't change the fact that it is currently not being paid for by the government. Go take a look at the EM board. You can find a nice breakdown of where the funding for EMTALA (another unfunded mandate) comes from. Turns out, it comes from the doctors. Who knew? Increasing health care spending necessitates that the money comes from somewhere. It isn't coming from the government, and I doubt that the insurance companies are going to provide for more than the law requires. There aren't that many other places funding can come from.
Thank god! Well I hope you have highlighted in the budget where and what to cut to help the health care system then! Please write your congressman and senators to tell them your feelings and ideas so they can adjust and/or repeal the bill for something that will be better for us all in the long run...since we are all trying to be doctors here..
Why are you getting on his back for pointing out the fact that the bill is unfunded? The fact of the matter is that funding should have been addressed before the bill was passed, that might have allowed for more people to agree with it. As it is, we now have a piece of legislation that might work out really well, or might become an utter failure because there isn't anyone to pay for it. The onus to point out funding opportunities is on the people who enact the policy, not the people who will be effected by it. Your comment is like telling a kid that you're going to steal ten marbles from him tomorrow, so he'd better find ten marbles by then. Just doesn't make any sense.
It's a sad situation with respect to the Health Care Bill. Finally the U.S. is joining
other first-world countries with a comprehensive health care, but unfortunately in a
piece-meal basis. The best approach is to cover everybody under an expanded
Medicare and impose a value-added tax to pay for it. The French model works very
well, but these ideas smacks of socialism and therefore its an un-American concept.
The Darwinians among the posters suggest survival of the fittest. Surprising coming
from medical types because Residencies are paid for out of Medicare dollars and
a bulk of the patient load will utilize Medicare as the vehicle for payment. The notion
that folks can pay for medical care by swapping chickens in lieu of payment is dead
and gone. The pre-Obamacare system just doesn't work, but again if one believes in
survival of the fittest and medical care is a privilege rather than a right then lots
of third-world countries need your services.
With all due respect, having a single payer system is not a great idea. The short term problem with such a system is that it would be incredibly expensive. Healthcare spending is currently at 16% of our GDP. Do you really think that the government could just take that over? Then you'll say that we could make it more efficient, cut out the middle-men and the unnecessary spending. And you'd be right. But the fact remains that our country spends a huge amount on healthcare, and if the government takes it over, they would have to increase taxes in order to cover the cost. So it would still be the citizens paying for it.
Now take a look at the long term problems with a single payer system. Medicare would not be immune to the problems that plague any other monopoly. In an effort to cut costs, I guarantee you that reimbursements would not follow inflation. Medical technological innovations would stall out because there would be nobody who could afford to invest in them. So yes, everyone would be covered. But the level of care they would get in 20, or in 50 years would end up suffering.
You could even look at it from the point of view of who would become doctors. 95% of what I've seen on this forum shows that people go into medicine first out of a sense of responsibility, and the money is only a secondary factor. But if reimbursements to doctors fall, then our best and brightest won't be as motivated to pursue medicine, and eventually you'll end up with a healthcare system where the providers aren't the best that they could be.
I don't pretend to have the solution, but I am quite convinced that socialism is not it.
