If you have any options that are truly different, I'll add them. A "tax holiday" seems very much like using tax monies, except the hospital has no guaranteee that the cost will be covered by the re-directed taxes, so it still has to do some cost-shifting. However, I'm open to a discussion that it is a genuinely different idea.
Part of my reason for having the pool was to point out that there are no really good options here. For people opposing mandatory health insurance, I'm asking them to examine the alternatives. I'll be happy to revfise the poll if I get some.
Hospitals that didn't go corporate went broke or got pushed aside, as the costs of medcine climbed, for reasons that have little to do with government.
I worked on a reply to this a few days ago, but I guess I must've looked out at the weather and just decided I'd better get on the road sooner than later and just dumped it.
My "tax holiday" euphoric thought was possibly somewhat like our current medical deductions on the itemized forms, except I've always groused at having to run up some really big bills before it could possibly ever be a good choice to itemize. I have never itemized, even with some big home mortgage interest I could put in.
For folks who never pay any taxes, a "tax holiday" is meaningless. . . . 47% out of the game right there. And almost all of the uninsured kids your poll addresses. For folks who have good jobs with insurance coverage, like me, it would also be meaningless. So it's for the self-employed who do make enough money to pay taxes, and who also have to pay a significant part of the costs of the uninsured, the illegals the government forces the corporate hospital emergency rooms to treat for ordinary complaints. . . .or worse. Well, actually anyone who works for any company that pays for health insurance is seeing their salary negotiating position affected by the cost of their health insurance.
I'd just like truly catastrophic illnesses/injuries not be the reason for bankruptcy. . . . meaning since in that case the hospitals don't get paid, the 53% have to pay not only higher medical costs for themselves but higher interest rates on mortgages to bail out the bank's losses, and higher taxes for the welfare benefits etc etc etc. So give them a low-interest loan with ten years' taxes due taken as payoff on the loan. Give others who contribute a dollar-matching tax benefit. Maybe they'll have hope and keep trying. I've carried tenants who had overwhelming medical problems before for while, until I couldn't justify it because they were just doped out on pain meds and robbing the neighborhood pharmacy for clearly destructive levels of abuse. I've also seen LDS bishops carry tenants for years in questionable circumstances, until it became quite clearly a no-win and in fact self-destructive and fraudulent abuse thing. People die inside when they can't see the reason to get up and go back to work when they can. If you're going to create perpetual dependence, you'd be more humane to just line them up on a firing line and order "shoot".
I like co-ops and credit unions. . . . great concept of participant ownership, collective market power, direct benefits to participants. I like that better than corporations defined by shareholder interests and cartel tactics. Let's do a health co-op. We'll hire all kinds of health practitioners, by group contract, including homeopathists, allopathists, chiropractors, even health-maintenance groups who do heavy preventative counseling. We'll use a baseline concept like the medical savings accounts to incentivize participants to cut down on the nickel & dime non-serious stuff, and pay a reasonable insurance rate for the catastropic type of thing. We'll ask those who can to further contribute to a charity aimed at saving the lives of kids whose parents are not insured, and ask our competent providers to match our contribution when they care for kids our charity is going to help.
I really like seeing some kid's pic nailed to all the lightpoles telling about the bank where you can contribute to help pay for the needed care. And hearing the good news about all the people who helped.
I like seeing extended families pitching in to help family members in times of catastrophic need. I like seeing doctors give a kid a cut rate---that happens more than you'd probably imagine, and the private charities that pitch in on numerous types of cases.
In the case of catastrophic medical needs, such as saving a kid's life, there is a huge payback that comes from saving the kid's life when he grows up and becomes productive. Keeping people directly involved in the whole operation is much healthier for us as a nation than just letting the government directly pay for it all. Giving people incentive to care about the kids,particularly kids they know, has untold paybacks. Maybe we shouldn't "match dollar for dollar" contributions vs. taxes owed, exactly, but we should recognize the value of it and encourage/incentivize it enough to get it to happen in the first place, rather than just pay for it from the "government".
