From: hulsey@dbsun.uucp (hulsey)
Newsgroups: alt.rush-limbaugh,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
Subject: Re: Clinton & Taxes: 7% for health
Date: 14 Aug 92 18:31:28 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: BioMerieux-Vitek, St. Louis Mo.

aaiken@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (Andrew C. Aiken) writes:
>hulsey@dbsun.uucp (hulsey) writes:
>
>
>>Have you ever thought about starting a business?  Have you thought about
>>what would happen if your business would fail, and you would be left with
>>no health insurance?  What if you developed an expensive medical condition
>>while you were trying a new business, and no employer would let you onto
>>their health plan?
>
>
>>What I was saying was that the current health care system makes
>>entrepreneurship even more risky, and that small businesses and
>>individuals pay more for health insurance because the big companies
>>get deals.  National health insurance would help level *this* field.
>
>	A Federal health insurance program would have to get its funding 
>from somewhere.  The Clinton plan is "pay or play"-- that is, it forces
>businesses to fund health care one way or another.

> -- [reasonable criticism of Clinton's "pay or play" plan deleted]

I do not support Clinton's "pay or play" plan, for many of those reasons
you mentioned.  The problem is many people, including myself, are affected
by the fear of losing health insurance.  It is not easy to change plans
all the time, and if something happens to you while you are not covered,
insurance companies will not cover you.

> -- [reasonable criticism of lobbying advantages big businesses have deleted]

Agreed.

>	A national health care plan, further, will drive up costs.  The 
>seven per cent tax will, within ten years, be a twenty per cent tax.  Big
>business will still be able to use the cheaper private schemes, and the
>small businessman will be stuck with higher taxes.  I would like someday 
>to own my own business, but unless the middle class can rid itself of
>its addiction to government largesse, I do not see how I could survive
>the taxes.

  I guess I didn't make myself clear.  Ahem.  As an entrepreneur, supporting
just myself at first, I have to pay for my individual health insurance at
greater cost than my current employer pays for my insurance now.  If I were
to hire someone, first of all, he would be disconnected from his current
insurance plan, so he and his family better be healthy because insurance
companies have pre-existing condition checks.  Second, it will cost me
more to pay for equivalent insurance.  And third, if I should have to lay
him off, he has to go through the pre-existing condition checks again to
get health insurance at another company.

  "Pay or play" places the burden on the business.  I believe this is the
wrong place.  It's too bad that the Oregon system was not given a chance.
Funding only procedures that had reasonable benefit for cost values, and
cutting funding for extremely expensive procedures that would probably not
work seems to be a reasonable compromise.  Paying taxes to keep babies born
without brains alive is crazy.  This was the lowest ranked of all
procedures in the Oregon rankings and would not be funded.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
hulsey%dbsun.uucp@wupost.wustl.edu (Jim Hulsey)   TBDBITL '84 ('85 Rose Bowl)
An Ohioan living in Misery (Missouri, same difference)

Watch what you say!                Won't you sign up your name
They'll be calling you a radical   So you can be their dependable
A liberal, fanatical criminal      Respectable, presentable vegetable
--  Supertramp "The Logical Song"
Newsgroups: alt.rush-limbaugh