So many options. I would like to see Romney's decision tree.

Romney’s Wife Says Woman Being Eyed For Ticket « CBS DC

Obama is going to have to play the cards he's dealt with. If I was Romney, I would focus more on economy than on heathcare.

June jobs report: Hiring weak, unemployment unchanged - Jul. 6, 2012

I think Obama has overcome worse odds ... but no president since WWII has been relected with unemployment greater than 7.4%

The most important chart of the 2012 election - The Washington Post

I love this meme of "I can't hire because I don't know the tax rate". It's one of those if-you-repeat-it-enough-maybe-it-will-be-true. If you have demand, you hire. If you don't have demand, you don't hire. It's not suddenly going to go from 25% to 75% magically overnight and a tax rate going from 25% to 28% isn't going to give you pause when you need to hire someone to actually fulfill demand.

SI

I think it's just a polite way of saying that if the 2014 health care legislation goes through the cost of employing will rise so much that layoffs will be required. Therefore, let's not hire anyone to keep our potential severance costs lower.

You're right that the saying itself has become meaningless. As is most "code" intended to be politically correct.

Are there any places that you can get health insurance quote without giving up too much personal information? The cost of a family plan thru my wife's employer is greater than 65% of her monthly take home. I'm not super concerned about a high co-pay, as I would pay 100% of whatever is necessary now anyways.

That pretends to mean more than it does. From a rough reading of an unemployment chart, nobody has run for reelection with an unemployment rate of 8%.

This. Find me one person that could sell 100k more product, but won't because taxes may go up a few percentage points.

In the media these days, people who feel this way are called "freeloaders" and worse. The fact of the matter is that insurance with a low co-pay is much more expensive than the high-deductible plans. Most people have no idea how much most employer-paid insurance actually costs.

I made the same analysis when I decided to start this company 15 years ago. For a few years, I enjoyed the best of both worlds since I was married to someone who worked at a major corporation. When we had our son and she decided to stay at home full-time, I made a lot of phone calls and finally "woke up" to the fact that what we call "good" health insurance is extremely expensive, even for relatively healthy people.

What's available now varies from state to state. In Michigan, I'm pretty much limited to BCBS, and pay $160 a month for a $10k yearly deductible with no co-pay (it was $90 two years ago). I think it would approach $1,000 a month for a plan like what I'd have if I worked for a corporation. Keep in mind that these high-deductible plans will be illegal in 2014.

To answer your first question, insurance companies will ask a lot of personal questions. I would never advise lying to anyone, but I do believe some of the questions are a little unnecessary.

This is the question I've always wanted to ask about that - thanks for pointing out the answer!!!

HOLY FUCKBALLS BATMAN!!!

Exhibit #300million that healthcare costs in this country are fucking OUT OF CONTROL

Well, to be fair, she doesn't make that much money.

And that's why we need single payer.

High deductible plans do nothing for the problem of proactive vs. reactive care that we are facing, as they'd only be useful for people that ran into very serious conditions and not at all useful for middle to lower class people to get checkups or other preventative care which could help prevent said serious conditions.

Yup, then we can all have below average insurance with no options.

If you're ever guaranteed to sell 100k more product, it's a no-brainer to hire more even if your taxes go up 75%, but isn't hiring an employee the same as any other investment in your business, like a new location, or a new pizza oven? You have to pick the right time and balance projected sales, risks, etc. I don't think a modest tax increases would make any significant difference in that decision, just like a sight increase in the cost of a pizza oven wouldn't make a difference, but clearly the more expensive the oven/employee, the more careful you have to be, and the longer you have to wait to pull the trigger on a hire/buy.....I don't think a modest tax increase would impact much, but I do worry about the impact of new health care requirements.

Honestly, do you have any idea what you're talking about, or are you just a blithering fool? Took me less than 5 minutes to find this - it was like the 2nd google result.



World’s Best Medical Care? - New York Times

I wonder, do any of those 36 countries ahead of us in the health system rankings have anything that looks like Obamacare, with the influence of corporations and health insurance companies on government polices and the drafting of the healthcare legislation that we have here? I'm guessing most of the countries ahead of us have more nationalized, socialized, single-payer type systems...which isn't Obamacare....Obamacare may turn out to be a step backwards from those types of systems, in reality, and also because if it doesn't work as advertised, it will turn this country away from that type of system for generations.

Apparently you and those you have taken that information from do not believe in "American Exceptionalism."

Why is it the left is the side that believes that the USA can do anything when it puts things together, the right is always there to bitch that we shouldn't and can't do anything, yet the right is the side that then says that the left doesn't believe in "American Exceptionalism?"

Or does "American Exceptionalism" actually have nothing to do with what we do as a nation, but is merely a catch phrase of superiority? You know, something we can look at the rest of the world and say "Fuck you, you little pissant countries! We're better than you because we are AMERICA! Now make the shit we will buy so that our billionaires can make even bigger profits on that cheap shit. We need it to be cheap because we don't have the jobs here to buy products that are actually made here.

There surely is no correlation between massive profits, cheap products and a lack of jobs. Nope. None. We'll just have to cut taxes again on the wealthiest out there, because they create jobs. Maybe they didn't create jobs the last 18 times we cut their taxes, but the next time they will. And if not then, the next time... because they are the job creators and the only way they can create jobs is with lower taxes.

[Insert a why do you hate successful people? redstate/freerepublic meme here.]

Maybe someday in America we'll have liberals who actually believe in enacting polices rather than just bragging about them hypothetically. It's just so old. You have all the answers, we get it. The problems are complex, but you've figured them all out. You guys are brilliant and those with any different ideas are dumb. (and worse, anyone who disagrees with you on anything actually hates poor people and wants to protect the rich)

I think the liberals in power don't truly want the ideas to be tested, because it'd kill the cash cow. I think the power and control comes in maintaining the status quo (and then just blaming everyone else for "being stuck" in the status quo).

Obamacare is something modestly different and a good test, but, I still figure if it doesn't work it will just be someone else's fault, and it'll be something the liberals never"really" wanted. It's game for those in power to keep the aspirations always just out of reach of reality

So, molson, you start off with 'liberals are all talk, no action', then amazingly segue straight into Obamacare. So, which is it? If liberals in power don't truly want ideas to be tested, then why on Earth did they spend so much political capital getting the ACA passed?

Like I've said, I'm glad Obamacare's out there, I hope it gets a fair chance, I hope it succeeds. It's just the arrogance and morality plays that annoy me and I should know better than to get involved in it again and again. Healthcare and the economy are incredibly complicated, and people way smarter than all of us disagree on the best approaches, and it's cool and educational for us to disagree too - I just get a little worked up where people work in the morality stuff - if you think one thing or have one view it's just because you're brainwashed or hate poor people (same as if you have "x" view you hate success) Really, you're a better person simply for having a particular view about the nuts and bolts of an issue! That's the product that's sold and that's where political donations take off.

Obamacare has a billion built-in excuses, it's not an all-in thing. I remember a couple liberal posters here proclaiming they weren't going to support Obama in the '2012 Democratic primaries because of THIS plan, the one that is now apparently awesome. If it fails, we'll hear that again, how it was never really what they wanted.

Lots of lefties wanted single-payer. But that wasn't going to happen, so they decided doing something was better than doing nothing. I guess we'll find out whether or not that's actually true and whether health care will be like the Bowl Alliance with people wanting to go back to it, except with far greater/larger implications.

I'm still not clear on how you claim that 'Maybe someday in America we'll have liberals who actually believe in enacting polices rather than just bragging about them hypothetically.' If that was true, then how on earth does the ACA exist? It is pretty fucking far from hypothetical at this point.

Dola, if you want an example of bragging about something hypothetically, take a look at trickle-down economics. 30 years ago that was touted as the be-all end-all cure for economic issues. 30 years later, there has been the largest transfer of wealth from the common people to the gilded elite in the history of the world. And, incredibly, people are STILL buying into it, saying that if the policies aren't continued, then we all are facing economic ruin. Now it is not being sold in terms of trickle down benefiting everyone, it is in terms of killing off 'wealth creators'.

That's kind of what made me react, the liberal bragging seems to be about stuff at a higher level than the ACA, like how awesome a single-payer system would be. The REAL solution is always portrayed as being just out of reach and something more than what is actually possible. To keep reality from being tested. That rhetoric can survive any failed legislation. Maybe that's just unavoidable because obviously no party or viewpoint can get everything they want.

I like your view though and hope it's more like that - ACA as a definitive, specific, jumping off point for something real and different, that a party really believes in and that gets its fair opportunity to improve a bad system.

I'm not sure trickle-down economics is the sole (or primary) cause of the national deficit or the health care catastrophe, but I would be open-minded about someone presenting that theory as long as they could keep personal morals out of it. That's where my own rationality falls off a cliff - once someone tells me that one way or another is based on compassion or caring and/or another side is based on immoral greed (or that any political party is inherently correct in any situation, and the other side is just brainwashed, or liars), then I think they're full of shit and I want to explore the other view.

Edit: That's what I was responding to in M GO BLUE's post, looking back....that if you don't think "this way" you must be insincere and have some other motives, and a few pages before that if you don't think "this way" you must be brainwashed.

Even when (to put it in a term your profession uses) the preponderance of evidence points to something you think is full of shit?

No, I don't believe that there's a preponderance of evidence that any one economic philosophy is inherently correct (or more moral) in any given situation. I think in a lot of cases, execution is more important than the vision. (If we assume liberal is "correct", I'll take a well-administered conservative plan over a crapily run liberal plan any day).

But if you're being more specific about a narrow issue, maybe that's different. But for stuff like taxes, ACA, "trickle-down economics" (which can mean a million different things), nah, I don't think any of them can be proven good or bad by anyone on this board, we can only have opinions.

I don't consider myself a die-hard lefty but guess I am on this issue. This is me. Something is better than nothing.

I believe there are times when Fed/State government needs to come into play, "force an issue" and change the dynamics significantly to create a paradigm shift ... vs waiting on a (supposedly efficient) free market to cause that change.

I'm used to thinking of Healthcare as provider, payer and medical products. I think medical products is the most efficient, the other two much less so.

I do not think Obamacare is perfect, I'm not saying there are not better ideas out there, but this was the best that could be done all things considered.

I'm still waiting for a unified GOP stance on "repeal and replace" beyond the $2,500 tax credit that McCain proposed 4 years ago. The GOP have been very reactive, slow on healthcare issue and would not have done much without Obama's stance.

About morality of one stance vs another. I am interested in the conversation because I do believe there is a morality aspect to this.

I get this can take us down into a neverending rat hole of what if this or that etc. and agree it is unlikely to change beliefs (and piss people off) so there is no need to continue with this.

However, IMO there are clearly morality aspects to the healthcare debate.

But it's fine to say liberals are brainwashed and/or liars.

I'll throw this out there, and quickly duck...

Am I the only Socialist on the board?

The part is always left out of providing everything for your citizens, what happens when the money runs out and you can no longer provide? I am sure all of the European countries provided a blueprint that showed the money would always be there too.

You should probably throw pharma in as another big category. And, as far as medical products being the most efficient, if you mean DME, there are huge inefficiencies in that realm.

I've come to the point where I feel that single payer is probably the best long-term option for delivering equitable healthcare in this country. The real question becomes whether that equitable care is of high quality or not. If we model or base that single payer system off of the current Medicare/Medicaid system though, we're asking for long-term disaster. If we want to do this right, we need to tear the whole system down and rebuild it from square one. Too many inefficiencies and money-grabs exist in the current Medicare/Medicaid system (which admittedly also exist in the private insurance system). All you potentially accomplish by extending that "quality" of healthcare to more individuals is more revenue for those that are already taking advantage of the system. Sure you have more people getting medical care, but I think we should be shooting for better quality in addition to quantity.

Thats a little like saying that a purely 'private' health insurance scheme setup can't work by pointing at a specific country with a poor system as an example (say Ethiopia).

The failure (or otherwise) of specific countries economies has little to do with healthcare within Europe, if you look at the strongest economies in Europe it might interest you to know that they also have similar healthcare systems etc.

Greece isn't a problem because of healthcare and if we spent the OECD per capita average on healthcae it would largely eliminate our deficit problem.

Are there riots in Canada? How about we just copy them?

Taxes have almost no impact on hiring. I've never heard it brought up a single time in shareholder conference calls and I used to have to transcribe those things. So if it is an issue for all these companies, they are keeping it a secret from their shareholders.

Hiring is based on demand or perceived demand. You can create incentives such as tax credits for hiring which lower the overall cost and increase margins and lower potential risk. But one's own income tax rate has absolutely no impact on hiring, just demand. If you raised the CEO of Apple's income tax rate, he isn't firing a soul over it as long as people keep buying his products.

Like I said, for a problem they like to tout, it's never once come up in their conference calls.

No.

It appears it's all but a given that Missouri will opt-out of Obamacare. Support to opt-out is running 55-60% in polling.

It also appears that Claire McCaskill's Senate seat will go to the Republicans, mostly due to her support of Obamacare. All three Republican candidates are polling 50+% against her now no matter who wins the primary.

I think socialism means different things to different people. I support public education, some social programs and ACA.

However, it means being socialist vs capitalist, I would not consider myself socialist.

If taxes aren't an issue, then why do corporations keep their overseas profits overseas?

LePage Rails Against ‘Obamacare,’ Calls IRS ‘New Gestapo’ | TPMDC

I can't believe we elected this guy.

It's not an issue in hiring, it is in profits. You hire based on whether you feel the individual will provide a net positive to your company or not. No tax rate changes that.

Yeah, there are certain things that I think need to be socialized. Police force, roads, and so on. Everyone here is likely a socialist in some form or another. The extent though differs.

I'm a big fan of the free market and competition. Just don't think it's possible to do in areas like healthcare. There is no one competing for the business of someone with pre-existing conditions or someone who comes down with cancer. If you want a free market in healthcare, you have to allow those people and anyone else who doesn't have health insurance to die. Not many people are for that.

Gov Brewer's plans are so fantastic down in Arizona...

96 Year-Old Latino Former Arizona Governor Detained By Border Patrol In 100 Degree Heat | ThinkProgress