samdallas's Diary

Free Market healthcare

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:14:10 +0000

I just got a new pair of glasses. My employer paid for it. It is part of our vision plan. People without glasses subsidizing people with glasses. Since I am a programmer that is pretty moot; we all have glasses. But I didn’t pay a dime for my $300 glasses. So basically I had no incentive to not spend my employer’s (i.e., the stockholders’) money. That is ultimately one of the biggest problems with our current system; there is no incentive not to consume health care if you have employer-provided insurance. Ultimately that comes out of all our salaries but it is so indirect we just don’t see it. And it is socialism (if it looks like a duck…), just within a company.

How do we roll this back? I personally like Singapore’s system much better than ours. For non-catastrophic services they pay their own money out of a HSA. So there is an incentive not to spend. With the monkey of Medicare on our back I am not sure how to get to such a system. Here is one idea: give working adults a choice now: the feds can let you donate money into your HSAs instead of medicare payments, and you opt-out of medicare. Here is the catch. It is not currently possible to buy catastrophic coverage that makes ay sense because if you actually get sick they will find a way to drop you. That is some insurance reform that I do approve of. If that logistical problem can be solved, I think I would opt-out myself. But for now there is not a good alternative to medicare for your golden years– we need to change that.

John Birch Society

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:32:22 +0000

I have a coworker who is always on about how Teapartiers are just the “new JBS” who are “a bunch of nuts”. I have always heard the John Birch Society was an extremist group but I have been looking at www.jbs.org lately and I don’t see what all the fuss is about. They have several basic principles:

property rights
anti-communism
Christian values
growth is good

There is nothing I could find on their web site that had militia-like stuff on it or any promotion of violence except as a nation in defense of itself. The one thing I saw some red staters (possibly myself included but as I have written before I am in favor of nukes, nukes, and more nukes and fewer conventional forces) would object to is they want less military spending. So I ask you fellow red staters, where did this organization get such a bad name? Are they just getting a smear like the Teapartiers because that is easier than addressing the issues they raise?

Socialism in the workplace

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:34:13 +0000

While I hate the idea of federally controlled socialized medicine, I find it ironic I have been on socialized medicine in the private sector all my adult life. In my industry you couldn’t hire somebody without giving group health insurance; you just wouldn’t be competitive otherwise. So in addition to my salary, my compensation includes a group policy for my family. I have one office mate with no wife or kids, and one with a wife six kids. They do the same job and have approximately the same salary. I figure the single guy is receiving about $15k a year less in compensation because of this “within company” socialism. I’ve tried to do some digging into how we got into this mess, and from what I can tell insurance started getting linked to employment as a way around wage caps in WW2 (I would love to know more from those that have studied more than I have). Is there a way for us to unroll this? Counting your insurance as taxable income would help IF it were coupled to lowering the income tax rate– perhaps part of a flat tax plan?

Couple this with the socialized schooling and tax exemptions you get for dependents, and I wonder just what percentage of our socialist wealth transfer occurs among employed people just based on their number of dependents.