Conference back40::soapbox

so you wanted government sponsored health care for all, eh? well keep in mind
that here in MN that's exactly what the liberal dims are trying to do. i
reported here about 6 months ago that they grossly underestimated the costs
and were only able to cover about 15% of those "elligible" with their initial
funding request. well guess what? surprise, surprise. they are back asking
for more money from the state legislature. HOW MUCH they are asking is what
is truly amazing. and if some of us don't jump up and scream bloody murder
they may well get it. here is what they are proposing to cover all those
remaining that don't have healthcare here in MN:

  - higher taxes on cigarettes ($1 per pack more minimum)
  - higher taxes on beer, wine, and liquor (15-28% - "sin" taxes)
  - higher taxes on firearms (100% in some cases)
  - higher taxes on ammunition (100% in some cases)
  - applying the states 6.5% sales tax to clothing (its 0 today)
  - higher taxes on lottery tickets (more sin taxes)
  - higher income taxes (undetermined amount - its 8% today)
  - "other" taxes under consideration
     . employer payroll increases
     . lawyers fees in malpractice suits (i DIDN'T know this "income"
       was exempt from state income taxes - that REALLY pisses me off)
     . employee "cafeteria plans" (this is pre-tax deductions some employers
       allow employees to set aside to pay medical costs

all this revenue would be on top of the current taxes to help get this 
program off the ground which include a 2% tax on all doctors,
hospitals, and drug sales - including perscriptions.

all this money funneled OUT of our pockets and into government run programs
in the name of compassion. i WILL be at the hearings at the state capitol
after Xgiving. these people JUST DON'T GET IT!!!!

  slick et al, was suitably punished by the voters for his health care 
deception. i guess these idiots here just didn't get the message. its funny
but they had MANY more taxes lined up but "limited" this request to these
because of the "voters mood" demonstrated on 11/8. these people need a wake
up call.

    Dat's a lot of taxes...I'm sure such taxes would really help the local
    economy out, eh? (help it right into the toilet)

    It seems that Hillary's cadre of elitists who "toiled incessantly" to
    come up with HillaryCare (TM) also managed to feather their beds rather
    nicely. A report has shown that some of the consultants were making
    $50/hr and the government paid individuals in excess of $100k despite
    warnings from the white house's own lawyers only to use government
    employees. Speaking about welfare for the rich...

    
    Is that why they kept the records of the meetings secret?

    Isn't Ira Magaziner going to be indicted for something?

    PAGE ONE (WASHINGTON) -- `Fringe' Idea Now Key Plank
    SF Chronicle 15 Sep 95

    Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
    Washington

    Only a year ago, when the Clinton administration was trying to push its
    health care plan through Congress, medical savings accounts were
    dismissed as a fringe idea from free-market theorists.

    Now, with Republicans in control of Capitol Hill, the idea is a central
    element of the GOP's plan to overhaul Medicare and save $270 billion in
    health costs over the next seven years.

    Medical savings accounts would permit the elderly to use government
    money to buy a high-deductible catastrophic insurance policy and then
    set aside an additional sum in an account to pay for routine medical
    expenses. Any money left over in this account each year could be saved
    for the next year or spent on other things, from a vacation in the
    Bahamas to a new garage door.

    Republicans argue that medical savings accounts will help save Medicare
    from its impending bankruptcy, while expanding choice and quality of
    care for the elderly. Many Democrats see them as a dangerous scheme
    that will hurt the elderly and only deepen Medicare's financial crisis.
    Representative Pete Stark, the East Bay Democrat who formerly headed
    the House subcommittee that oversees Medicare, called medical savings
    accounts a ``cockamamie'' idea.

    But the idea could prove very alluring to consumers, and some Democrats
    have warmed to it. It could also prove very powerful at holding down
    health care costs -- if it works the way proponents say it will.

    ``This is a power-to-the-people revolution in health care coverage,''
    said Peter Ferrara of the National Center for Policy Analysis in
    Dallas, the group most heavily promoting medical savings accounts. ``It
    gives control over the Medicare program to people themselves, rather
    than the government, insurance companies, doctors, hospitals and all
    the rest.''

    Although (proponents say) as many as 1,000 companies now use medical
    savings accounts successfully to provide employee health care, they are
    virtually untested among the elderly. Critics worry that they will lure
    healthy people to private insurance and leave Medicare with the sickest
    and costliest patients, driving up their premiums and taxpayer costs.

    Whether medical savings accounts will lower costs or boomerang,
    ``nobody knows,'' said Mark Pauly, a professor of health care systems
    at the Wharton School. ``It's something we won't really know for sure
    until we try it.''

    Details of the Republican Medicare plan are still in flux, but in its
    essence it would add private alternatives to Medicare. The hope is to
    use market forces -- competition among providers and a price incentive
    among consumers -- to put a lid on health costs.

    HOW IT WOULD WORK

    Under the new system, seniors could choose to stay in traditional
    fee-for-service Medicare or sign up with various alternative providers
    that would contract with Medicare. The government would pay those plans
    the amount it normally spends on each person's Medicare, now about
    $4,800, adjusted for region and other factors. That would rise by a
    limited amount, about 6.4 percent annually, or 40 percent over seven
    years, to $6,700 in 2002.

    The packages would be required to have a minimum level of benefits and
    would compete with each other on the basis of additional benefits
    offered, such as prescription drugs or dental care. Seniors could
    choose among private or group-sponsored health insurance plans, myriad
    managed care networks such as health maintenance organizations or
    preferred provider networks, or medical savings accounts.

    Allowing seniors to choose how to spend their health care money and
    keep any savings introduces huge incentives to shop for value and limit
    costs. Under most insurance plans, including Medicare, the government
    or an insurance company pays most of the bill, so patients see little
    reason to examine their bills carefully or avoid going to the doctor
    for minor aches and pains.

    Proponents argue that medical savings accounts will be wildly popular
    because they offer advantages over Medicare: catastrophic coverage that
    protects people from the high cost of a serious illness, freedom to use
    their medical savings account to buy health care not covered by
    Medicare such as eyeglasses or prescription drugs, a potential pool of
    savings, and, proponents assert, higher quality health care.

    Others are not so sure.

    About 10 percent of the population accounts for about 72 percent of all
    health care spending. Many believe that the very sick will not be lured
    by the incentives medical savings accounts provide. ``You would not
    expect somebody in a hospital bed with tubes going in them to be
    shopping around,'' said Robert Mechanic, a senior manager at the
    Lewin-VHI health care consulting firm.

    AARP Undecided

    The American Association of Retired Persons has not yet taken a
    position on medical savings accounts. There is less cause for concern
    if they are one of several choices, said Martin Corry, director of
    federal affairs, but there are dangers. ``You're dealing with a
    population with higher health care costs,'' he said. ``It may make
    sense to market them to healthy 25-year- olds, but you have to question
    what it is you're buying when you're dealing with 65-, 75- and 85-
    year-olds.''

    Even John Liu, a Heritage Foundation analyst and one of the chief
    architects of the GOP's voucher proposal, worries about medical savings
    accounts' potential unintended consequences. ``They have to be really
    careful about how they structure them,'' Liu said. ``You're going to
    have serious adverse selection problems depending on how they design
    it.''

    But Liu is confident that vouchers generally will allow Republicans to
    get nearly all of the $270 billion Medicare savings they seek with
    minimal pain. Providers ``are going to be fighting to get that
    voucher,'' Liu argued. ``That competition among health plans is going
    to drive down premiums, and it's going to drive down waste, fraud and
    abuse, because now the plans will be forced once and for all to give
    value for that health care dollar.''

    `NOT OBVIOUSLY PREPOSTEROUS'

    Wharton's Pauly thinks medical savings accounts have potential. ``It's
    not an obviously preposterous idea that they'd save a good bit of
    money, so why not let the market and the choice of Americans who are
    certainly of voting age decide?'' he said.

    ``There are lots of hospitalizations, at least to judge from the
    evidence, that start with choices,'' Pauly said. ``You can pass a
    kidney stone with pain-killers, which is cheap, or you can get
    lithotripsy, which is expensive, but a lot less painful. What will you
    do?''

    If lithotripsy is free to the patient, the choice is easy. If the money
    comes out of a medical savings account that a patient has control over,
    the decision is harder.

    Yet for the elderly, adding a financial element to a medical decision,
    however freely made, may be especially painful. If one's 85-year- old
    mother gets cancer, should she have chemotherapy? ``It sounds
    undesirable to force people to think about those kinds of things,''
    Pauly said, ``but it may actually be the reinforcing incentive people
    need to avoid those heroic measures that we as a society really don't
    want them to have, but are unwilling ourselves to forbid.''

    PAGE ONE (WASHINGTON) -- GOP Reveals Plan to Reform Medicare
    Elderly would have new alternatives for health coverage
    SF Chronicle 15 Sep 95

    Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
    Washington

    Republicans released yesterday an outline of their long-awaited plan to
    overhaul Medicare, touching off a political holy war over one of the
    most sacrosanct programs in the federal government.

    Still only a rough outline that lacks many key details, the plan would
    allow seniors to stay in traditional Medicare or sign up with a variety
    of private alternatives such as managed care networks or doctor groups
    that would contract directly with Medicare.

    A third option would be medical savings accounts, in which the elderly
    could use their Medicare benefits to buy a policy covering catastrophic
    illness, combined with a special tax-free account for routine care.

    Republicans hope to extract $270 billion in savings by 2002 from the
    hugely popular program covering 37 million elderly and disabled people
    as part of their attempt to balance the budget. Although per-person
    spending would still grow by 40 percent -- from $4,800 to $6,700 in
    2002 -- it would be limited for the first time since Medicare's
    creation in 1965. Without any changes, spending for benefits would rise
    to $8,000 per person.

    Co-payments and deductibles would remain unchanged, but Republicans
    intend to raise premiums and begin phasing out Medicare subsidies for
    individuals with incomes of $75,000 or more and couples with incomes of
    at least $150,000.

    The plan also contains a controversial provision that would slash
    payments to doctors and hospitals if the other changes fail to produce
    the required savings.

    VOUCHERS MISSING

    Despite the uproar, however, the plan is less than the fundamental
    overhaul Republicans had promised. They appear to have backed away from
    a voucher system that would enable the elderly to buy their own health
    plans and give them direct control over their Medicare money. Vouchers
    were originally proposed as a way to create competition among providers
    to hold down costs and to provide incentives for the elderly to
    restrain their spending.

    Instead, providers will contract with Medicare and compete for senior
    citizens' business on the basis of benefits offered, such as
    prescription drugs or eyeglasses. Each plan will be required to offer a
    minimum benefit package.

    Republicans still hope that these private alternatives, combined with
    medical savings accounts, will create sufficient competition to
    restrain spending. But the removal of vouchers seriously weakens those
    incentives, said John Liu, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation,
    making it more likely that the government will have to cut payments to
    doctors and hospitals.

    That method is the same one Democrats used to try to control Medicare
    spending, with scant success. Medicare continued to soar, even as
    providers, seeing their payment for treating Medicare patients cut,
    shifted those costs onto patients covered by private insurance, fueling
    a cost spiral there.

    GOP leaders held a rare House and Senate joint caucus to rally their
    troops for a battle that both parties are staking their futures on.
    ``Medicare is the heart of this fight,'' House Speaker Newt Gingrich
    said, referring to the GOP's hugely ambitious plan to balance the
    budget, cut taxes, reform welfare and rein in Medicare and Medicaid, a
    sister program for the poor.

    GREAT SOCIETY LEGACY

    Democrats vowed to defend relentlessly their biggest legacy of the
    Great Society, threatening to hold their own hearings outside the
    Capitol if need be to tell Americans that the GOP is about to gut their
    favorite program to finance a tax cut for the wealthy.

    Gingrich told his troops to expect ``lie after lie designed to frighten
    people.''

    ``Think about a party whose last stand is to frighten 85-year- olds,
    and you'll understand how totally morally bankrupt the modern
    Democratic Party is.''

    Democrats blasted back with unbridled fury. ``It's an outrage,'' House
    Democratic leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri declared at a press
    conference.

    ``Medicare fraud in its purest form,'' added Senator Wendell Ford of
    Kentucky.

    Democrats vowed to do everything in their legislative and political
    power to block the GOP plan. Medicare ``is the best program this
    country's ever put forward for our people,'' Gephardt said, ``and
    they're going to decimate it for a tax break for the wealthiest people,
    take it right out of the pockets of senior citizens. It's wrong, and
    we're not going to let it happen.''

    Fazio Calls It `Stealth'

    ``The operative word . . . is stealth,'' added Representative Vic Fazio
    of Sacramento, accusing Republicans of hiding their proposal and
    plotting only one day of hearings.

    ``We're going to hold our own hearings on the lawn if we have to,''
    Gephardt said. ``We're not going to let it happen without the American
    people being heard.''

    Republicans insist that their changes are essential to stall Medicare's
    bankruptcy; Democrats charge that much smaller savings -- about $89
    billion -- would do. The rest of the savings, Democrats contend, will
    be used to balance the budget ``on the backs of seniors'' and finance
    tax cuts which they contend will benefit primarily the well-to-do.

    In fact, Medicare, taxes and the budget are inseparable. Medicare, one
    of the fastest-growing budget items, is largely responsible for chronic
    federal deficits. Experts say the program is lurching toward financial
    collapse, not so much when its so-called trust fund goes bankrupt in
    2002, but when the baby boom generation begins to retire in 15 years
    and its Medicare and Social Security benefits swamp the federal budget.

    On top of it, they said they haven't even finished the bill.  The 59
    pages were only a "summary"  
    
    meg

    Only in DC could 59 pages be considered a "summary".
    
    Put this in the things that make you gak topic.
    
    
    -steve

    The bill on medicare reform is supposed to be4 over 900 pages.  
    
    It will be so confusing the lawyers who wrote it won't be able to
    understand it, and this is reform?
    
    
    meg

    We should repeal any bill that takes more than 10 pages to introduce
    into law.  
    
    Any law that the people cannot fully understand (without a team of
    lawyers at hand) is crap.  
    
    
    -steve

    >    Now the Democratic has a proposal to reform the medicare/medicaid.
    >    It will cut medicare $89 Billion in 10 years. 
    
     That's reform? Not even a nail trimming.

    
    These famous "tax cuts for the RICH"... like those RICH people
    who, say, sell their house and move to another part of the country,
    because their job relocates, right? Sound familiar? I thought
    it might...

    -b

    
    
    Tax cut for the rich?  Give me a friggin break.  What a good sheople.

>              <<< Note 22.12 by CSOA1::LEECH "Dia do bheatha." >>>
>    We should repeal any bill that takes more than 10 pages to introduce
>    into law.  
>    Any law that the people cannot fully understand (without a team of
>    lawyers at hand) is crap.  

Agreed.
What the hell good is thousands and thousands of pages of laws? NOBODY knows
all of them, nobody could possibly follow all of them, nor enforce them. Just
imagine all the government flunkies we're paying for to write up all of that.

    Karen saved my mental health

| <<< Note 22.18 by MKOTS3::JMARTIN "I press on toward the goal" >>>

| Karen saved my mental health

	I'm not even sure God could do that! :-)

    Jack,
    
    I said you were a good salescritter, I didn't say you were a sane
    one ;-}
    

    
    >Jack,
    
    >I said you were a good salescritter
    
    Jack:  So I can sign you up for this $5million order?
    
    Customer:  Yes! Yes!  $5million, $10million, whatever you like!
               Throw in a couple more 2100's. Just puhlease, puhlease
               stop talking, have mercy for goodness sake!  I can't
               take it any more.  Arrrrrrrgh!  <signs order, jumps
    	      out window>
    
    
    
      

	I think many are ready to ask him to stop talking. :-)

> What the hell good is thousands and thousands of pages of laws?
    
    That's like asking Digital "what the hell good is thousands and
    thousands of computers?
    
    Then think of the primary occupation of the lawmakers...
    
    Duh.  
    
    	Mike
    

> What the hell good is thousands and thousands of pages of laws?
    
    The reason that all these laws exist are to expand the power of, and insure
    the the future employment of, parasitical elite politicians

    <-- and the lawyers.  Don't forget about the lawyers.

    True enough.  Parasitical Elite Politicians does not convey the meaning
    of "lawyer" nearly as well as Bloodsucking Tyrant Liars.  You should be
    more careful in your choice of words.