Under new Laws, Health Care Will Still not be Affordable for Ordinary Families, so Many Will go Without Care

Anyone who claims this law will be affordable for ordinary families is, whether they know it or not, being a moron, because no one and nothing is talking about the following items which determine whether a very large expense is affordable or not.

In other words, the following are the reasons why there is no way that a scheme like this will ever be affordable for a good percentage of the peasants, public option or not.

1. The federal subsidies are determined only by adjusted gross income (AGI)and without regard to expenses that can not be deducted when AGI is calculated. Some families simply can not afford 20% or more(10% for premiums and 10% or more for deductibles, co-pays, medications, and uncovered items) of income for health care; there are too many other important items on the expense list. Families living in high cost of living areas are especially hurt by the false assumption that 20%-25% of income on health care is reasonable.

2. The subsidies are determined without regard to net worth, liabilities (debts) and debt repayment. A family paying $1,000 or $1,500 a month on student loan and/or credit card debts gets no more subsidy than one paying nothing on student loan and credit card debt. Since the majority of but not all families have debts, and since debt servicing varies radically from one family to another, this issue alone makes the scheme unworkable.

3. In the real world, incomes can fall from whatever they were in year x to next to nothing in year y. Since the subsidies are based on last year's income, some families will face an impossible cash flow problem and will not be able to actually pay the premiums in year y when unemployment or other fiascos strike. So they end up uninsured even though they paid handsomely for some years prior and even though the federal government paid the subsidy to the insurance company.

In the real world, families have sometimes been paying premiums (full or employee share) and sometimes not, depending on whether they are employed or not and what their pay rate is in different years. When you deny that reality and declare that families should every year pay for grossly overpriced health insurance policies, you have completely moved to la la land where money grows on trees, and you have totally messed up the household finances of tens of millions of people.

Yes, it's true, this cumbersome system will result in the US government, using your income tax receipts and money borrowed from China, paying subsidies to insurance companies, but then the people for whom the companies were paid are uninsured because they can't pay their share when they get invoiced. Will the federal government get a refund? I highly, highly doubt it. That money will be down the rat hole.

Not to mention that even if and when the policy is fully paid for, if the family can not afford the deductibles, co-pays, medications, and uncovered items, they are not going to get the actual health care or else they are going to get it and file for bankruptcy! And that means more of your tax money and more of China's money down the rat hole, too.

4. The subsidies are also without regard to number of children, and without regard to whether those children are in college or not. Families with the same adjusted gross income obviously have radically different expenses depending on those and related factors. Some of those expenses incurred for children of all ages are deductible when AGI is calculated but many of them are not.

5. The rest of the world has decided that middle income families should pay no more than about 10% of their income for health care and low income people should pay nothing, while the right wing Americans are saying 20-25% of income for middle and 10% of income for low income families is good.

No, that is not at all good. Sorry, but the days when the rest of the world is wrong and only the Americans are right are over.

The above was in response to this news article at Common Dreams.