jay_a2j wrote:Titanic wrote:You will be able to pay for your own healthcare!!!! You get to decide to be with whoever you want (or your employer decides if you have employer based healthcare). The whole point of this reform is to reduce costs, stop healthcare companies abusing and taking advantage of people, and to try and stop the escalating healthcare costs which will cripple the economy in the long run in nothing is done.
And here lies the problem....... I pay almost $200 a month for health care, deducted from my paycheck. If I have the choice between that and FREE health care (it isn't, but bear with me a moment) I'm gonna keep my $200! They say, "You can keep the insurance you already have." but no one in their right mind is going to pay for it if they can get it "free".
Herein lies the REAL problem. FIRST, you really pay far more than $200. You say you pay $200 a month for health care, deducted from your paycheck. But, in reality, I can almost gaurantee you truly pay far more, because your employer pays a good portion. I cannot find the statistic, but I heard that the average COBRA payment (allows you to continue with your insurance after leaving a job, but you pay the whole premium) was around $600 a month for a family of 4. Often the employer pays 2/3 and the employee pays 1/3 ... so that would be about right for you.
Now, for the bill... you would not be paying double. Under the original bill (the one cited in this forum many times) The healthcare offered is not a fully government system, "free", as you call it. You would have to select the public option and pay the premium. You could also elect to keep your current insurance OR you could get insurance from another company under the new terms.
Employers who do not offer insurance, would be charged a premium from the government, roughly equivalent to what is paid now for private insurance (actually, far less in many cases ... I heard $500 per employee and I have heard several small business owners say it would cost them $600 per employee to offer family coverage).
jay_a2j wrote:Now, addressing the "freeness" of it. If it results in higher taxes, I'm paying for someone else's health care, while I maintain my own private health care at $200 a month. (Ya that sounds senseable!) As a matter of fact, there is no way possible I'm not paying for someone else's health care! Which leads me to do the only thing that makes sense..... if I'm going to pay for it anyways, I might as well use it and hop on board the "Big Daddy Government take care of me" train to hell. As substandard as it would be.
Which is why that was not the original plan. Although, why you insist it would have to be substandard when every other industrialized country on Earth offers better overall care than most of us get. (not perfect, but definitely better)
At this point, though, it looks like ANY public option was taken off the table by Obama.
It would have been nice if you had actually read the bill before simply objecting "it's socialism".