Juan_Bottom wrote:The Dems accepted hundreds of Republican amendments. Unfortunately most of them were aimed at making the insurance market 'more free,' so they weren't included in the final legislation.
Hundreds? Wow. Your list seems like less than hundreds.
Your list is irrelevant to the argument in any event. Your original assertion is that the Republicans didn't have a plan to reform healthcare/health insurance. They did have a plan, multiple plans actually. And you've provided evidence for that yourself. The best (in my opinion) Republican plan was to make the insurance market "more free." I've heard the assertion that the Republicans didn't have a plan many, many, many times from Democrats. It's simply not true. Thanks for proving that it's not true.
Papa Johns
I can't stand Papa Johns pizza. All chain pizza restaurants should be outlawed. I already buy my pizza from local shops.
In any event, let's look at the problems with the Affordable Care Act:
(1) The Affordable Care Act increaes taxes without providing an incremental benefit. The law has 18 different tax increases that are imposed as follows:
(a) 40 percent excise tax on "Cadillac" health insurance plans that are valued in excess of $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families. The tax hike takes effect in 2018, after President Obama is gone.
(b) Increases the Medical Hospital Insurance portion of the payroll tax which increases the employee's portion of the tax from 1.45% to 2.35% for families making more than $250,000 per year.
(c) New 3.8% Medicare tax on investment income.
(2) The Affordable Care Act is fiscally unsound. The CBO estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cut projected deficits by $124 billion from 2010 to 2019. One of the "savings" is the cuts ($575 billion projected) to Medicare. Ignoring whether there will be consequences to retirees over the cuts, the CBO itself noted that if the cuts were "implemented incompletely" then there will not be a fiscal savings. The chief actuary for Medicare also indicated that it is likely the savings in Medicare cuts will not materialize and the new spending under the Affordable Care Act will be added to the deficit. Basically, the Medicare stuff would cut payments to physicians and there is bipartisan agreement to stop this from happening. Keeping these cuts will likely also cause doctors to stop serving some Medicare recipients. The president plans to implement the "non-cut" to Medicare payments to doctors in another law. Why? So he can say the Affordable Care Act is fiscally sound. Further, the Affordable Care Act creates a subsidy program for low- and middle-income people to purchase insurance in the new health exchange. Great, right? The CBO predicts that 19 million people will benefit from this program at a cost of $460 billion by 2019. However, the new law, as we see in the case of Papa Johns (and others, including historically Democrat supporting companies), creates incentives for employers to drop existing coverage and allow employees to purchase taxpayer-subsidized coverage. The former CBO director stated that employers could drop coverage, raise wages (maye), pay the employer penalty for not offering insurance, and still be okay. Finally (and important for everyone that doesn't know it), the CBO projection looks at the first 10 years of the law, but only includes 6 (!) years of spending. The law does this because it now meets the requirements of the Pay as you Go rule, which requires legislation to exhibit deficit neutrality over a 10-year window.
(3) The Affordable Care Act will not raise premiums or reduce patient choice. False. The US Department of Health and Human Services received new powers to impose a wide range of detailed benefit requirements of employer health insurance plans and of health insurers. Let's examine some of these things:
(a) Health insurers and employer plans must cover numerous preventative services with no enrollee cost-sharing. These include the following things: (i) items in the recommendations of the United States Preventative Services Task Force, (ii) immunizations recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and (iii) for women, infants, and children, additional preventative care and screenings supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration.
(b) Prohibits health insurers and employers from setting lifetime coverage limits on the dollar value of benefits.
(c) Limits deductibles for employer plans in the small-group market o $2,000 ($4,000 for families). Limits total cost-sharing for any health plan to the levels specified under Health Savings Account plans ($5,950 for self-only coverage and $11,900 for families).
(d) Allows Health and Human Services to set and revise "essential health benefits packages" of minimum health insurnace coverage requirements. Isn't this good? Maybe, but as I indicated in another thread, there are great incentives for doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and health insurers to get the HHS to include more "essential health benefits." Why? Because it makes those dudes more loot. So that means more costly health insurance, which goes to #2 above.
(e) Premiums will increase because (i) mandated reductions in enrollee cost-sharing will mean that insurers must pay more of the cost for services they already cover, thus shifting those costs from patients to plan premiums; (ii) prohibits enrollee cost-sharing for specific servics will stimulate greater use of those services, further increasing premiums; (iii) premiums will also increase to the extent that new federal regulations require plans to cover benefits or services that were previously excluded or subject to plan limitations.
So there are three things. There are more but I'm tired of typing.
JB wrote:You're expecting too much.
Am I? I was expecting health insurance reform that would do one of two things: (1) make insurance more freely portable and more competitive; or (2) government provided health insurance. Neither of those are off-the-wall expectations. In fact, most Democrats, if not all, expected #2 and didn't get it. Instead they got an insurance company boondoggle.
Juan_Bottom wrote:Well the Republicans want to completely do away with the Affordable Care Act, so yeah I'd say that they're pretty much the opposites of the Democrats.
I think you're being naive.
Juan_Bottom wrote:This is pretty dishonest.
If we accept the Argument from Authority and understand that experts the world over were warning of a complete global financial crash, then we can infer what would have happened if the second bailout had not gone through.
Okay, let's infer that there was a complete global financial crash if the second bailout hadn't gone through. Would that have been a bad thing in the long run given that we're on the precipe of another crash and that experts the world over either believe we didn't go far enough or believe the new "restrictions" (ha) on banks and financial institutions aren't good enough? Or, if we're talking about people like me, believe that failed companies need to fail in order for the companies not to make the same mistakes?
So then we come back to why the bailouts were enacted in the first place. Let's say McCain won the election in 2008 and, as one of his first acts as president, signed into law the same bailouts that President Obama signed into law. What would you be posting about right now? I suspect you'd be posting that the bailouts were a complete failure and just a corporate boondoggle.
Anyway, let's look at the bailouts:
(1) Auto bailout - Government spent $79.3 billion assisting two companies (2!): General Motors and Chrysler. According to most reports, more than 1 million jobs were saved ($79,000 per job). It is arguable whether GM or Chrysler are out of the woods yet. Corporate boondoggle?
(2) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - Government was projected to spend $787 billion, but spent $825 billion. The CBO estimates that the stimulus raised the number of employees by 1.4 million ($589,285 per job). Corporate boondoggle?
(3) Extension of unemployment insurance benefits. I'm indifferent to these, except with respect to anecdotal situations (wherein my friends that were fired received unemployment insurance and then went to the beach for six months).
(4) HIRE Act - $17 billion cost with 10.6 million people hired. That's a pretty good rate of return, except that it is unclear how many people would have been hired without the HIRE Act. Corporate boondoggle?
Four bailout bills. Three corporate boondoggles. No money directly goes to employees in three of those laws; the money goes to companies (like Papa Johns). You are probably asking what the alternatives were. There are two alternatives, one for each side of the aisle:
(A) Democrat Alternative: Do the FDR New Deal thing and have the federal government hire people to build bridges or clean highways or whatever.
(B) Republican Alternative: Give money to the people directly.
The Republicans and Democrats supported neither of those things. Why? Crony capitalism.
Juan_Bottom wrote:Argument from Authority. I don't have one single iota of a problem with a lawmaker working with any particular expert in whatever field they are tasked with wrangling and understanding. As Neils DeGrasse-Tyson said, we don't elect engineers or scientists to Congress, we just elect lawmaker after lawmaker.
The OFR was set-up in part to prevent crisis, but more so to regulate Wall-Street.
The other's aren't. The Dodd-Frank Act in particular is just a set of rules that say taxpayers are not liable for failures, ending the era of "too big to fail" for forever. Instead, mega-banks that are at risk are taken apart by the financial industry itself, and not by the government. There's no way to say "there will never be another crisis" but we obviously learned from the last one, and we can say that John Q. Taxpayer isn't on the hook if anything like that should happen again.
I would have thought five years ago that John Q. Taxpayer wouldn't be on the hook if something happened in 2009. Turns out I was wrong. You're going to be wrong the next time this happens. If we are at the point where the government needs to spend money to help private companies so they don't fail, it's going to happen again. Once we made that choice in 2008/2009/2010, we're going to make that choice again when (not if) it happens again. We've set a precedent.
Let's look at what's wrong with the Dodd Frank Act in a little more detail (this is mostly from non-independent research by me):
(1) Richard Shelby (Republican on the Senate Banking Committee) and Jack Reed (Democratic senator) both indicated that the banks are choosing or having a big voice in the choice of regulators. Crony capitalism!
(2) Some experts argue that Dodd Frank does not end too big to fail. Moody's (you know, the ratings guys) seees the Dodd-Frank Act ending too big to fail by forcing bank creditors at the bank holding companies to take losses, but also sees the regulators enshrining into law that operating companies won't fail (i.e. will get bailouts again). This is from CNBC by the way.
(3) The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (the biggest Wall Street lobby) expressed support for the law and has urged Congress not to change or repeal it in order to PREVENT A STRONGER LAW FROM PASSING!
(4) David Skeel, a law professor, concluded that the law has two themes: (1) goverment parntership with the largest Wall Street banks and financial institutions; and (2) a system of ad hoc inverventions by regulators that are divorced from basic rule-of-law constraints. He finds the law disturbing.
(5) Barney Frank campaign contributions (contributors): Goldman Sachs ($16,500 in 2011-2012), SEIU ($10,000 in 2011-2012), KPMG ($8,000 in 2011-2012). Barney Frank contributions (by industry): securities and investment is number one with $79,050.
(6) Chris Dodd campaign contributions (contributors): Citigroup ($424,794 from 1989-2012), Royal Bank of Scotland ($327,950 from 1989-2012), JP Morgan Chase ($300,823 from 1989-2012), SAC Capital Advisors ($297,000 from 1989-2012). Chris Dodd contributions (by industiry: securities and investment is number one with $6,403,857 between 1989 and 2012.
Juan_Bottom wrote:That's a non-point when I'm talking about specifics.
Though, on a related note - Last week Paul Ryan was asked about his tax plan and how much the rich were going to pay. His response? He needed to get together with Mitt Romney to decide which loopholes to keep or cut. My point? They don't have specifics while the Dems do.
Your last post did not offer any Demcorat specifics.
Juan_Bottom wrote:But what you're talking about is actually called Fascism, or perhaps Red Communism. I have no idea why you'd ask this rhetorical question when it doesn't address any point that I made, and I don't see how it helps your position of "I don't know anything about this." What the Obama administrations hopes to do is to reward students, not punish them.
Well yeah, that's my point. Why would political advisors (who are more intelligent than you and me combined) think that by offering students more money for college, the students would major in "tech" majors? The answer is that the political advisors don't think that. The political advisors think that by giving students more money for school, the students can pay more money to the schools themselves. That allows schools to raise tuition to ridiculously onerous amounts (note Newsweek's cover story this week is about whether college is actually worthwhile). I graduated college 11 years ago. When I went, my college tuition was about $27,000 a year. It has nearly doubled in 10 years (I think it's at $45,000 now). What other prices have doubled in ten years? This whole thing is a boondoggle for universities; non-profit universities which are not state run are raising their tuition and students are still going. Students are still going because they can still afford it. Students can still afford it because the banks are still giving out loans or the government is still giving out loans or grants.
If the government wanted to increase the number of tech educated people, they would tie grants or loans to majoring in a "useful" major. They don't do that because they don't care about that. They care about making sure their alma mater or the place that's going to hire them as dean someday gets more money out of the government.
Juan_Bottom wrote: During that same period, wages paid to working people hit an all-time low as a percentage of the economy, even as corporate profits and executive pay set records.
As a percentage of the economy. AS A PERCENTAGE OF THE ECONOMY. Wages are not lower than they were in 1970 so stop saying that. It's misleading at best, and a blatant and purposeful lie at worse. I've seen the chart that shows the economy increasing dramatically while wages increase just a little. I don't like it either. But I don't see the wages decreasing. Sorry.