Saturday, September 21, 2013

GOP Wants to Replace Obamacare with GOPcare

The Republican alternative to Obamacare is just another plan that will keep government involved in healthcare. Republicans aren't eliminating coercion, whereby the healthy must pay for the care of those, who don't have health insurance. It is just structured a bit differently.

Avik Roy reports:
[M]any Republicans and conservative health wonks support using high-risk pools as a “transition to a freer health-care market.” In theory, high-risk pools allow us to subsidize truly uninsurable people with pre-existing conditions in a separate, taxpayer-subsidized insurance pool, while leaving everyone else free to pursue the health insurance approach of one’s choice.[...]However, like any government-driven intervention into a private market, high-risk pools do come with several caveats, caveats that we should fully consider. In particular, high-risk pools still require government involvement in the pricing of risk, something that political entities tend to do poorly, opening up future fiscal liabilities[...]
[L]ibertarians could make the[...]objection: that high-risk pools, just like Obamacare, give people an incentive to go without insurance, knowing that if they fall ill or get injured, they can qualify for a high-risk pool. 
Bottom line: GOPcare is market distorting and will cost the taxpayer dearly This is somehow the best Republican cronies can do as far as an alternative to Obamacare socialism which is market distorting and  and will cost the taxpayer dearly.

(ht Felix Bronstein)

6 comments:

  1. Like the Dumbocrats, the Rethuglicans are in bed with Big Pharma:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2009/01/08/GR2009010800559.html

    And Big Insurance:

    http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=F09

    (I wonder how Rand Paul will vote on GOPCare?)

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  2. Robert Prasch: The “Lessons” that Wall Street, Treasury, and the White House Need You to Believe About the Lehman Collapse

    By Robert E. Prasch, Department of Economics, Middlebury College. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

    Five long years have passed since the demise of the once venerable firm of Lehman Brothers. To mark the occasion, Wall Street, the United States Treasury Department, the White House, and their several political proxies and spokespersons have taken to the mass media to instruct the public in the “lessons” to be drawn from the financial crisis of 2007-09. Regrettably, we are witnessing the propagation of several self-serving falsehoods in the hope that the public can be induced to embrace them now that the immediacy of the events in question is in the past. Some of the lessons are so flagrantly false that they demand immediate correction.

    No One Saw It Coming

    Of all the falsehoods being circulated, this one is in many ways the most egregious and damaging. It systemically denies the attribution of credit and thereby voice (and political power) to those who in fact did see “it” coming even as it provides blanket exoneration to those whose ignorance–or more likely–cowardice combined with self-interest prevented them from perceiving what was happening in the financial sector. Those making this latter claim can, more correctly, observe that, “no one in our close-knit circle of elites saw it coming.” Stated in this form, the statement is suggestive. Why, we might ask, was their circle exclusively made up of individuals who did not, would not, or could not, see the crisis coming? Why is it, in a nation with the diversity and talent of the United States, that all of the senior managers of our largest financial firms, and those charged with regulating them, were exclusively made up of individuals sharing the same perspective – a perspective that, I might add, was and remains so singularly and disastrously dysfunctional for the economy upon which the rest of us depend?
    These are compelling questions because, as a matter of fact, many highly-informed people “did see it coming.”

    As a consequence, those assets could no longer serve as collateral for the short-term lending that had become lifeblood of Wall Street financing. This perspective, one that remains unquestioned across Manhattan and Northwest Washington, was enshrined in the name given to the bailout legislation – the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Notice, these assets were described as “troubled,” not “failed,” not “garbage,” not “riddled with fraud and misrepresentation.” No, they were merely “troubled.”

    To affirm their contention that the problem was one of liquidity rather than insolvency, Wall Street, Treasury, and the White House have never passed on any opportunity to tell us that taxpayers actually “made money” on the bailout. This claim, as with so much else that they have told us, is a whopping falsehood. To maintain this illusion requires a great deal of “creative accounting,” as my co-author and I demonstrated in our re-estimation of the true costs of the AIG bailout.

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/09/robert-prasch-the-lessons-that-wall-street-treasury-and-the-white-house-need-you-to-believe-about-the-lehman-collapse.html

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  3. Austrian economics falls apart with non-elective surgery. When the supplier of goods and services dictates demand, Austrians have no answer. It's outside their axiom.

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    Replies
    1. but as usual, you are wrong . its like any emergency service such as a tree coming smashing down into your house or even getting a flat tire. You still need someone to stabilize the situation.

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    2. Jerry, do you do stupidity or trolling for a living?

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  4. Is the sole purpose of the Republican Party to bamboozle Obama? In the process, they’re making every last American dance for their dinner (and healthcare.) http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2012/10/bamboozling-obama.html

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