Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
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More shock and surprise! Stuart Butler not telling the truth...WOW, who would believe the people who invented the individual mandate would now say it is a bad idea?
BTW, Thank you for not reading what Robert Moffit wrote. I will provide the paramount issue he explains.
Most workers do not purchase health insurance; it is purchased by somebody else, usually the company. For most workers, it is a free good, an extra, that automatically comes with the job. At least, we live with that comfortable illusion. But, in fact, it is not free at all, and the employer gives us nothing.
He suggests a simple financial disclosure on the part of the nations employers, requiring every employer to put periodically on the pay stub of every worker in America something like the following: We have paid you X thousand dollars in health benefits. This has reduced your wages by X thousand dollars.
Here is much more of what Moffit wrote.
Personal Freedom Responsibility And Mandates
The Taxpayer Mandate
Policy analysts at The Heritage Foundation have wrestled incessantly with. this problem, while developing a consumer choice plan for comprehensive health system reform, now embodied in a major legislative proposal.3 Only after extensive analysis of the peculiar distortions of the health insurance market did Heritage scholars reluctantly agree to an individual mandate.
On this point, some observations are in order. First, much of the debate over whether we should have a mandate is, in a sense, a debate over a metaphysical abstraction. 4 For all practical purposes, we already have a powerful and increasingly oppressive mandate: a mandate on taxpayers.
We all pay for the health care of those who do not pay, in two ways. First, people with private insurance pay through that insurance even though that insurance is often the property of employers under current law. This reflects the ever-higher costs shifted to offset the billions of dollars of costs of uncompensated care in hospitals, clinics, and physicians offices. Second, if those who are uninsured get seriously ill and are forced to spend down their assets to cope with their huge medical bills, their care is paid for, not through employer-based or private insurance premiums, but through taxes, money taken by federal and state tax collectors to fund Medicaid or other public assistance programs that serve the poor or those impoverished because of a serious illness.
Hospitals also have legal obligations to accept and care for those who enter seeking assistance. No responsible public official is proposing repeal of these statutory provisions, and very few physicians, if any, are prepared to deny treatment to persons seeking their help merely because they cannot afford to pay. As taxpayers and subscribers to private health insurance, the American people pick up these bills.
Aside from current economic arrangements, the entire moral and cultural tenor of our society reinforces the taxpayer mandate. Those who are uninsured and cannot pay for their care will be cared for, and those who are insured and working will pay for that care.
So, we already have a mandate. But it is both inefficient and unfair.
3 The Consumer Choice Health Security Act. sponsored by Sen. Don Nickles (R-OK) and Rep. Cliff Steams (R-FL). The bill has twenty-four Senate cosponsors, making it the leading Senate alternative to the Clinton plan. S.M. Butler and E.F. Haislmaier, The Consumer Choice Health Security Act (S. 1743, H.R. 3698), Issue Bulletin no. 186 (The Heritage Foundation, December 1993).
