Ouch. Not happy, guv.

Have y'all not been paying attention? This is basically what he's been saying all along. He's been carrying water for the national GOP. It's not going to be pretty in Tennessee no matter what happens in the federal courts.

Yeah it's mostly just repeating what he said when the bill passed. I do love this line:

Our goal should be advocating for an approach that embraces healthy choices and personal responsibility and accountability for a healthy lifestyle.

Because if everyone is just "healthy" and "responsible," then nobody will ever get sick and die.

Have y'all not been paying attention?

I believe I tried to warn y'all all along. But whatever.

There weren't any good choices in this election. Haslam is turning out to be an even worse choice than expected.

At least I'll be able to say I didn't vote for the guy, and never even considered it.

He is proposing cutting $300 million from Tenn Care! That's children and the sickest and poorest among us. But they won't be around much longer.

Unless Bredesen and company put Tennessee into the Florida case, I don't think Tennessee would be a part of it and if Bredesen did have Tennessee join in the Florida fun, I'd think Bredesen knew what he was doing. Bredesen had a lot more to say about ObamaCare than Haslam ever thought about saying and Bredesen even wrote a book about how wrong ObamaCare really is.

Noam Chomsky:

Eliminating social programs has goals that go well beyond concentration of wealth and power. Social security, public schools, and other such deviations from the 'right way' are based on 'evil doctrines,' among them the pernicious belief that we should care, as a community, whether the disabled widow on the other side of town can make it through the day, or the child next door should have a chance for a decent future. These evil doctrines derive from the principle of sympathy that was taken to be the core of human nature by Adam Smith and David Hume, a principle that must be driven from the mind. Privatization has other benefits. If working people depend on the stock market for their pensions, health care, and other means of survival, they have a stake in undermining their own interests: opposing wage increases, health and safety regulations, and other measures that might cut into profits that flow to the benefactors on whom they must rely, in a manner reminiscent of feudalism.

(Hegemony or Survival, 2003)

No, really. Why? I'm not forced to buy auto insurance; I can just take public transportation. I'm not forced to buy home insurance; I can just rent a house if I like.

So why on earth should people be forced to buy health insurance that's ridiculously overpriced, undereffective and damn well near worthless to people like ME until we get quite a bit older?

Case in point: Caught a feral kitten for TNR this past Friday. Little vixen put a through-and-through on my left index finger with her fangs. Went to the Minute Clinic. $118 later, treated.

$118 used to be the amount I'd have to pay for one month of insurance premiums back in the corporate world. And that was regardless of whether or not any feral cats decided to make a snack out of my hand.

No. Just... no. I'm not paying that much and I don't have to. If insurers want my business, they're going to have to lower their prices. A LOT.

So maybe people supporting this massive steaming load of failure should stop whining about everybody else not liking the concept of being forced to pay gobs of cash for something that is RARELY utilized enough to justify the expenditure of said gobs, and maybe start whining about the massive costs of healthcare in general and insurance in particular.

Just a thought.

First off, if you don't have insurance and get deathly ill you aren't just left to die. You get served by a public hospital, so in fact you do have a level of insurance no matter what. How are you paying for that? You may not be. it may be everyone else's taxes that pay. It's a lower level of care but it is care, none the less. The insurance that everyone will be "forced" to buy is heavily subsidized for lower income workers. It is a deal for them, but frankly that is what insurance is anyway...a deal for those who need it, subsidized by those who take an actuarially calculated risk, pay into the system and then hope they never need anything back. In a sane world there would be no insurance companies. There would be risk pools managed by actuaries, much like many other countries already do.

Now, regardless of your libertarian objections (I'm sure you don't want and refuse to pay for police protection as well as medical insurance) you have not offered an alternative to the current plan that will actually work. why don't you outline a plan that will cover everyone in America with basic health care insurance and hold the cost to, say, 12% of the Gross Domestic Product. That would still make it the most expensive health care system in the world but would reduce costs by one third.

Put up or shut up.

Dude, you seriously don't understand insurance. You might pay more in premiums now, at age 31, than you spend on overall healthcare this year, but when you get older - age 61, say - and you have to have a colostomy bag in order to go out of the house it's a different story. God forbid you should develop Alzheimer's.

I suspect BP is being intentionally dense. He spouts too many talking points to have given much actual thought to this. i wonder which training session he went to?

Let's all petition BP to open a hospital. It is clear that with his skill and knowledge set, it could be the model for the nation while providing those of us lucky enough to live nearby with excellent, safe, and reasonably priced health care.

If not that, then I suppose we could petition Gov Haslam to appoint him head of TennCare.

I'm typing a little fast for you guys so I'll take a short break and let y'all catch up. Maybe even try calling Scott again.

Could you point out exactly where I "attacked the messenger"?

I'm largely with JFM on this in that I HATE the requirement to purchase insurance. I HATE the idea that alleged Christians think that it is reasonable for somebody to make a profit if a 6 year old running in a public park should trip and break an arm. I HATE the amounts of money that hospital and HMO administrators get paid as well as insurance executives but, my personal experience as an employee of a medical diagnostics equipment company suggests that those salaries are not the primary driver of health care costs.

I agree with you that personal responsibility, were it to become suddenly in vogue, could lower costs significantly. IF we were to reduce our fast food consumption by 90%, if we were to make sure that our intake of fiber and our exposure to the Sun for sufficient generation of vitamin D, that our diets were primarily leafy green and orange vegetables and fruits, and that all of us were at or slightly below our "ideal" weight, medical costs would certainly go down very drastically. However, that would in no way positively affect the situation that JFM found himself without a potential negative offsetting factor.

The tone of most of your posts here would be offensive if there was a reason to take you seriously. You seem to imply ignorance and lazyness for anyone who dares disagree with you at the same time as you give lip (keyboard?) service to respectful interaction. I actually doubt that you are anywhere near as dense as your posts would indicate leading one to believe that you have a specific agenda, that you consider this performance art, or that you simply enjoy believing that you are somehow controlling people.

Whatever.

Getting back to the question of how making everyone buy insurance would lower costs, consider the following 2008 per-capita health care expenditures from the OECD and you tell me:

Country	         USD
United States	7538
Norway	        5003
Switzerland	4627
Luxembourg	4237
Canada	        4079
Netherlands	4063
Belgium	        3995
Austria	        3970
Ireland	        3793
Germany	        3737
France	        3696
Denmark	        3540
Sweden	        3470
Iceland	        3359
Australia	3353
United Kingdom	3129
Finland	        3008
Spain	        2902
Italy	        2870
Japan	        2729
Greece	        2687
New Zealand	2685
Slovenia	2329
Israel	        2165

I don't know how that works, but there does seem to be a pattern. Many (most?) of these (except the U.S.) have national health insurance or a socialized, government run health care system that covers 100% of their population. Some even do it through a combination of government funding and private insurance, hospitals, and doctors. just like us. Some have a basic right to health care in their constitution. And many have better outcomes.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that many/most have removed profits from the balance sheet of health care costs.

And for a few days. Maybe that Lykins guy will pop on and have something to say. Always a pleasure talking with that guy.

It used to be that way for a lot of you people too. But I guess we couldn't agree to disagree. Oh well. Sucks, but that's life.

Best of luck and best of health to you guys. I mean that. (Even Toby and Neal.)

This thread has managed to make me bored with the health care debate. Never thought that would happen. Thanks, BP.

So under this plan, if a person refused to pay for health insurance, would they be thrown in jail?

The HCRA also included provisions to cap profit taking by ensuring a certain percentage of premiums had to got towards.... well, HEALTH CARE.

We got only one if several items sought to reduce costs. If we had gotten the public option to give TRUE competition, it would even be mote effective.

Oh, and the scare tactics of insurance agencies hiking rates because of the initial requirements (no more lifetime caps) and in planning of future caps? Didn't happen on my end. Our premium increase was astoundingly low, literally less than one-SIXth our normal premium hike.

I'll also add that perhaps a better analogy is fire/ambulance service. In the city, it's required, part of your taxes, government supplied and works well. On the county, it's optional, but you need to own your home free and clear (your bank isn't stupid enough to let you go without it).

What happens if your home goes up in flame and you have no Rural Metro subscription? Don't know. I doubt they'd let it burn down. They'd probably bill you for something, but spread the cost around to the rest of us subscribers. Hard to know because most people here aren't stupid enough to do it, and a $15k fire call still doesn't compare to a $1M health event. But it's a better analogy than car insurance.

Also, if you have no income you can get health care via MediCaid.