Nov 13 2009
America To Liberals: Keep Your Government Stained Hands Off Our Health Care!
I don’t need to put a lot of words around these graphs, which clearly illustrates the reaction of America to a government take over of health care:
By 2-1 America wants to keep the current system – ’nuff said. BTW, any Democratg congress-critter on this list with a partisan voter index (PVI) of R+1 or higher should pay attention – your career is on the line.
Update: Ed Morrissey has some comments, but I fail to see why people missed the second graph which is the big news here – keep what we have regarding health care.
[…] link: The Strata-Sphere » America To Liberals: Keep Your Government Stained Hands Off Our Health Care! […]
People want more affordable health care. This is particularly true for those who are self-employed or employed by small businesses that can not get insurance at large group rates.
Some VERY simple measures by the federal government could change that without having government owning health care.
1. Standardize state mandates or create an alternative federal mandate. One major problem with our system today is that each state has different coverage requirements. So a policy in Rhode Island for a given amount of coverage and deductible is a different price than the same policy in Connecticut. That is because Connecticut mandates that hair transplants be covered while Rhode Island doesn’t.
That is dumb. Standardize the requirements across the states OR create a baseline federal required coverage and allow people to choose from a “state” policy that is only sold in their state or “federal” coverage plan that can be purchased from an insurance company anywhere in the US.
2. Allow individuals and small businesses to pool together to create larger insurance groups for lower rates. This might allow the creation of neighborhood insurance coops where individuals and employees of small businesses can pool together to create a larger group and get rates comparable to larger employers. This also acts to separate insurance from employment and allows an individual to keep their insurance across employers. Allow the same tax breaks for this individual coverage as you do for employment based insurance.
3. Cap malpractice awards. West Virginia was losing doctors at an alarming rate because of poor people trying to hit the litigation lotto getting huge payouts on malpractice suits and juries awarding them. Some counties in West Virginia were down to a single doctor. They capped malpractice awards and the doctors have returned. Like any other service, when you have more people offering it, the price comes down and the quality generally goes up. Capping malpractice awards reduces the rates the doctors must pay and that savings can be passed along to the users of their services.
Those three things would go a LONG way toward reducing medical costs for everyone without government ownership of the problem.
Now the REAL problem is that government wants to use “health care reform” to force millions of younger Americans into government health care to subsidize the elderly on medicare because medicare is getting ready to go broke. Rather than being honest and dealing with the medicare issue, they want to draw attention to “health care” in general to hide the fact that Medicare is in serious trouble.
Crosspatch,
Sorry, way too simple and would only take 100 pages or so to implement. Go back to the drawing board and work up a confusing, corrupt and illegal plan and we’ll look at it.
Tom in CA
AJ:
Noticed on the Cook list are four districts from your home state of Virginia. VA-2,5,9,&11. The Governor-elect won all four districts wtih over 60% of the vote except VA-11 and he won that district by 10 points.
Do you know if there is any credible Republican opposition running in 2010 as of yet?
If the R’s gain four seats in Virginia, watch out. A 60 seat gain is possible, although I predict a 40 seat pickup.
Crosspatch: On the health care bill the Stupak amendment was huge. Not for the health care debate in the Senate nor the House because Pelosi will get the votes to pass any bill and in the Senate the $4 trillion and counting number will prevent cloture more than the Stupak amendment. The vote on Stupak was eye opening. 241-174. Bi-partisan approval of a pro-life measure takes the social issues off the table for 2010. Now we know why Deeds was such a failure. The R’s can run as fiscal conservatives and ignore the social issues. The cultural wars are over. What I want to know is when the war ended and how did the traditional value side win? Don’t ask the state controlled media, they don’t have a clue.
Anyway, with fiscal & national security issues to run on, the R’s will be able to fight on the suburban turf that the Dems took in the last five to ten years. One final note, in a year looking grim for the Dems, I would not be shocked if we see five to ten congress-critters switching parties early next year.
Mark N, My feeling is the Dems will lose at least 3. The one long term incumbent in the southwest corner may be tough to unseat and Jim Moran represents the liberal nuthouse of VA.
Maybe the long term incumbent in the southwest corner will switch parties. Although looking at the Virginia returns there was a couple of R’s unseating some long term Dem incumbents in your House of Delegates from the southwest corner.