Winfield/Poirot for Atlasia, because, what have ya got to lose?

[vote for pedro]

If you are arguing against a $450 medical procedure, you are living in a fantasy world!

I wish I could find medical insurance for less than $450 per month.  Insurance I will hopefully never need because I'll never meet the $5000 deductible.  And dental isn't even covered!  I would welcome a mere $450 dental surgery bill.  From my experience an actual dental surgery bill runs in the $thousands.

I am a healthy American who takes care of himself.  Why should I be forced to pay for the un-insurable by paying outrageous premiums for what amounts to catastrophic only insurance?  I would be much better off setting that $8-900 per month aside and self insuring myself.

At least when you made vehicle insurance mandatory, I can get a discount for no moving violations and no accidents.  And you didn't force the insurance companies to cover the DUIs and other bad drivers in with my insurance pool.  Forcing me to buy medical insurance and raising my rates to $10k per year and raising my deductible to $5k per year because I'm healthy and earn a living wage is downright criminal.

If you want my vote, you will either remove the mandate for healthy lower-middle class people to buy overpriced so called "insurance," or find a way to pay for healthcare for the un-insurable through your proposed "tax on rich people."   Your current system is extremely regressive on the working class.

[vote for pedro]

Well, you clearly didn't read his post at all (which is hard to believe, seeing as it is written in giant orange font), because nowhere does he mention the number $450 or imply support for the existing insurance system. I also love how you talk about the "un-insurable" as if we are somehow less important than you.

$150.00 for a 60 second consultation before actually removing the tooth, costing the patient an additional two or three hundred dollars is outrageous,

Giant orange font.  $150 + $300 = $450.  I would gladly pay that if it was realistic.  I'm not a fan of paying $800-$900 per month for "insurance" that doesn't even cover dental procedures or come close to meeting the deductable for a normal healthy person.  Maybe rich people can afford that kind of tax, but not me.

[vote for pedro]

If you are arguing against a $450 medical procedure, you are living in a fantasy world!

I wish I could find medical insurance for less than $450 per month.  Insurance I will hopefully never need because I'll never meet the $5000 deductible.  And dental isn't even covered!  I would welcome a mere $450 dental surgery bill.  From my experience an actual dental surgery bill runs in the $thousands.

I am a healthy American who takes care of himself.  Why should I be forced to pay for the un-insurable by paying outrageous premiums for what amounts to catastrophic only insurance?  I would be much better off setting that $8-900 per month aside and self insuring myself.

Technically you previously would have paid for the uninsured anyway, through taxpayer funded reimbursements for Hospital Emergency rooms and also generalized inflation spread across the entirety of the system. Making this much worse is that care given is the most expensive and the last effective. It would be far cheaper to give them the needed medications and preventative care up front then waiting until it is an Emergency room situation and spending far more to achieve far less.

Now that said, I do think there are better ways to go about doing this and the whole of healthcare then Obamacare, ones with far fewer mandates, which also raise costs.

Yeah, he said he was going to raise the taxes on rich people, not me.

I'm just a healthy working class stiff.  My premiums and deductibles have gone through the roof due to the "affordable care act."  I'm taking tripled so they are way in excess of my income taxes.  ACA is a severe regressive tax on the healthy middle class. 

[vote for pedro]

Technically you previously would have paid for the uninsured anyway, through taxpayer funded reimbursements for Hospital Emergency rooms and also generalized inflation spread across the entirety of the system. Making this much worse is that care given is the most expensive and the last effective. It would be far cheaper to give them the needed medications and preventative care up front then waiting until it is an Emergency room situation and spending far more to achieve far less.

Exactly. There are fundamentally two ways to approach this issue: you can provide universal access to preventative medical care so that we no longer have legions of uninsured persons seeking expensive emergency care they can't pay for, or you can bar everyone without an insurance card from entering a hospital and allow them to die in the streets. Obviously, only one of those options is morally acceptable, and we're fortunate that the leadership of both parties agree on that fundamental fact.

Of course, there are many ways you can go about providing universal coverage. The Affordable Care Act is an imperfect solution that comes with its own problems and needs to be overhauled, but it's a hell of a lot better than the old system in that it at least acknowledges we can't go on relying on emergency rooms and high-risk pools to care for the working poor and those with pre-existing conditions.

Nobody was "dying in the streets" before the ACA.

If you think the solution is to continue to fund this social experiment on the backs of the lower-middle class, prepare to be voted out of office.

[vote for pedro]

Nobody was "dying in the streets" before the ACA.

Right; as Yankee explained, they were receiving emergency care that they were then unable to pay for, which raised costs for everyone.

If you think the solution is to continue to fund this social experiment on the backs of the lower-middle class

(a) I am lower middle class, my friend.
(b) Read my post again. If you had bothered to examine my record before jumping to conclusions about my political beliefs, you would know that I don't think the Affordable Care Act is the best long-term solution to this problem. I do think current plan is preferable to doing nothing, but it carries serious flaws that need to be addressed. The president and I are in agreement on this.

prepare to be voted out of office.

According to recent polls, my approval rating is currently 100%. I'll take my chances.

Good for you.  I hope for your sake nobody wakes up to who is actually paying for this mess.

[vote for pedro]

The 150.00 for 60 seconds with a dentist was simply an example of how out of control medical and dental care can be. 

To take it to the extreme, 150.00 for one minute translates into 9,000.00 per hour.

But anyway, as many of you are aware, I have long been a proponent of an effective, efficient, affordable universal health care system, paid for by public money, by employee deductions, by corporate deductions, and by cutting out waste in the medical system.

That ain't how it works, a $150 consultation does not equal $9000 per hour no matter how quickly it can be completed.  Just tell the dentist you want to be poked and prodded for an extra few minutes if you don't feel you are getting your money's worth.

Actually, the cost of a doctor visit has become completely irrelevant to people like me.  After I pay my mandatory "insurance" premium for the month, there is no money left over for a doctor visit.  That is the real out of control cost problem.

But getting back to your example, do you plan to somehow enslave the dentist and force him to work for free?  Who is going to pay back the student loan, pay for rent, staff, supplies, insurance and overhead?  How much will the dentist be allowed to charge under your plan?  And why would they want to remain a dentist?