Peeking under the hood of ObamaCare – not polite.

These people keep voting these same idiots back in. Unbelievable.

This “bill” is about TAXES and TAKING more of mine and your MONEY! This “bill” has the government taking MONEY from all of our healthcare plans that we already have and they will be TAKING money from every medical appliance you will need and they will be taking money from those who don’t need healthcare. This is about TAKING YOUR MONEY nothing more!

This is my first diary. I hope to write at least one a week time permitting. I am certainly impressed with the level of discussion here, especially after having gotten used to the vitriol of the Left over at Huff Po. Thanks for welcoming me with such kind words.

JadedbyPolitics, you have nailed it. I would argue that it’s about TAKING CONTROL though, not necessarily money. Money is just a means to CONTROL.

BTW, these entitlement programs are next to impossible to stop once they get implemented. There was a great article in the WSJ today about Corzine running ridiculous ads saying his Republican opponent, Chris Christie, wanted to stop insurance companies from paying for mammograms. That’s the kind of deceitful campaign these Statists run after they force premiums up by mandating all insurance companies cover certain procedures. The minute someone tries to reform them and make more choices available, to put decisions back in the people’s hands, they get attacked by viscous smears from the Left. If FauxbamaCare passes (in some form or another) expect a lot more of these dishonorable tactics.

national cost for each family (3 each family) is $5,800 and the you allow the number of citizens who are uninsured at 30 million (divide by 3) = 10 million families x $5,800 = 58 billion. x 10 years = $580 billion.
The fuzzy math released by the CBO which understated costs and savings, allows for reducing medicare benefits paid and counts new taxes for ten years but expenses approximately 20 million new insureds for only seven years assumes a cost of 830 billion.
How can the government claim to be offering an alternative that “keeps the insurance companies honest” and be competitive yet their own estimates indicate it will cost taxpayers twice as much to insure 20 million through this scheme than just purchasing private coverage for 30 million?
A combination of tort reform and medicare fraud prevention would cost the taxpayer $0, would reduce medicare benefits $0 and generate sufficient funds to simply pay the premiums for 30 million.
I do not support government being involved in health insurance or regulating health care services, but the rough numbers illustrate the volume of waste being added.

Normally when people start talking about correlation and causation I roll my eyes, because correlation doesn’t imply causation.

But you turned that around, so that the logic works: causation implies correlation, so that without correlation there can have been no causation.

Good work.

I would note a couple of points, though:

1) most of the states listed under “highest # of uninsured” are Southern border states, or have large hispanic/illegal populations (Georgia, Texas, N Mexico, California, Louisiana, Nevada, Florida, Wyoming and Oklahoma all fall under this category). It would be interesting to adjust for illegals, and then to see how the states compare.

2) As you implied, many of the states with low #s of uninsured encourage or mandate insurance through regulation, so it can’t really be argued that high premiums encourage more uninsured.

In any case, since you weren’t attempting to make a case against healthcare, your OP makes for a fantastic rebuttal to the absurd leftist claims about healthcare. Recoed! (Hopefully, my post sounded OK and not hostile; I’m extremely tired, and I’ve been told that sometimes my writing comes of as confrontational when I’m exhausted.)

Nice diary. Once again, increased demand push prices up.

I am continually shocked at how many supposedly bright people (especially politicians) don’t understand high school economics. Increasing demand pushes prices up, increasing supply pushes prices down. Government mandates can change the supply or the demand, but don’t change the economic reality.

Adding 47M (or 30M) people to the health insurance market will increase prices.

-Bri

You have indeed shown that the states with the highest cost of living have the highest insurance premiums. The states with the largest rural poor population have the most uninsured. Also, the states with the largest illegal immigrant population make the highest uninsured list. Does your source count illegals?

I have not gone through your links, and perhaps they answer my questions, and if so mea culpa.

If properly normalized, this data would be worth while, but without that, its just one more example of using data out of context.

And there are other important things to take away.
-If you normalized cost of living, or average income across the country and Massachusetts still had the highest premiums, that’d be a HUGE blow, seeing as they have they have the nearest thing to what the government is trying to do.

Also, remember, there is no reason to bash health insurance reform as a whole. There are several key areas that we should focus on reforming. A while back Moe listed them, with Tort reform near the top of the list, and interstate competition following closely.

I am whole heartedly against federal government programs, including the “public option” for health insurance. But it hurts my soul when we needlessly use bad statistics to make a point. We DO NOT need them to win this debate.