In the SST forum, users are free to discuss philosophy, music, art, religion, sock colour, whatever. It's a haven from the madness of Bulldrek; alternately intellectual and mundane, this is where the controversy takes place.
Salvation122 wrote:Where are you working that you're making $38k-45k and not getting health insurance?
: I'm...not? I think you're probably doing the math with my daughter in there?
Your subsidy scales with the number of people in your household, because the number of people in your household increases the poverty line. So in your case, you wouldn't be in the 250-300% bracket, you'd be in the 200-250% bracket. (I think. I'm not certain how exactly household size is determined when a child with shared custody is involved; you'd probably need to talk to someone at social services or something. I'm assuming that your daughter will count as a member of your household for the purposes of the poverty guidelines.) That'd put you at $120-192 a month, which is probably more palatable.
the few people who work for the company are all 1099 employees, and no one gets health care.
Literally everyone being 1099 is kind of odd. Guess it let's him dodge unemployment, though.
Salvation122 wrote:That'd put you at $120-192 a month, which is probably more palatable.
Definitely, but still untenable. Our expenses are already higher than our income, and I'm just getting to where that's no longer true, and here comes this.
Salvation122 wrote:Literally everyone being 1099 is kind of odd. Guess it let's him dodge unemployment, though.
It's my call, and yeah, that's a lot of it. I don't want to pay unemployment, or do the added paperwork, or pay our tax accountant any more, or learn the real rules for payroll, or any of that shit. It means I don't get, you know, health insurance and unemployment and all that, but it means the company stays solvent, and I make enough money to almost pay my bills.
So is your argument, 3PO, that you if your company has to pay for health insurance the company will collapse, even though it doesn't have to pay for health insurance?
Not exactly. I'm not making an argument, I'm just saying my company can't afford to pay for health insurance [or unemployment insurance, or payroll expenses, or federal and state taxes], so when my boss asked if I thought we should move everyone to employees [rather than contractors], I told him we definitely shouldn't do that. It's not a complaint, or an argument, it's just the reality of working for a very small company with a very small margin.
I don't think the size of the tax credit would cover the cost of the insurance, but I know next to nothing about anything involving governments. Do you have a good source of info?
Not at all. I have no information on Obamacare, as the whole idea of it is completely alien to me. We have a pretty good health system over here, so we don't have to be concerned about things like this. We just have to stop the government destroying health care and turning it into America. That's pretty easy to do for the most part, as people are happy to point at the U.S. and say, "We don't want that." That's usually the rallying cry behind any attempt to destroy Australian health care.
I just find this whole debate a little strange, really. The positives of good health care far outweigh any negatives.
Perhaps I'm being a little Debbie Downer but while agree in general with your statement Elf-a good health care system is essential in some ways-I think we, Americans, could fuck up a wet dream. We'll screw it up and make the Insurance Companies even richer, while fucking the working man and woman.
Australia's system is one of the better ones, although how much of that is the system and how much the culture is certainly up for debate, and thus whether it'd work for the US is uncertain. But I wouldn't mind living under Australia's system, any more than I would the Dutch, Norwegian, or Canadian systems; I would prefer to live under a system that was far more fully privatized than the current US system, but one mostly or fully government-funded wouldn't, like, deeply offend me, it's just not part of the package of government programs I personally prefer.
What surely isn't working is the US' current system, in which government still pays almost half of health care costs, plus it's still all really expensive, and the people still aren't very healthy. There are some compensations, and a lot of the cause is cultural, but honestly I think our half-measures system - with mostly private care, but massive tax breaks for employers to provide insurance - creates a situation in which costs are kept artificially high, without sufficient competition.
Well isn't privatisation the reason that it's so expensive to begin with? Other countries where the government fits the bill for healthcare have a far cheaper system of healthcare than the US. The US spends roughly double what the British do per capita.
It's the same as most of these free-market things: because the market isn't actually free, we can't tell if it's privatization or partial privatization that's the problem. The market distortion caused by tax incentives for health insurance is definitely highly debated.
It's interesting to compare the various not-US healthcare systems out there, and compare expenses and outcomes. In the UK, a much higher portion of health care costs is borne by the government [81.3 percent] than in Australia [67.5 percent], but Australia's infant mortality and life expectancy are much better than the UK. A lot of this is cultural, but a lot lies in the details of the respective systems, and in matching those details to the culture.
That infant mortality thing is because we eat Vegemite, which contains lots of folate, which prevents major birth defects. We're totally cheating when it comes to infant mortality.
3278 wrote:It's the same as most of these free-market things: because the market isn't actually free, we can't tell if it's privatization or partial privatization that's the problem. The market distortion caused by tax incentives for health insurance is definitely highly debated.
It's interesting to compare the various not-US healthcare systems out there, and compare expenses and outcomes. In the UK, a much higher portion of health care costs is borne by the government [81.3 percent] than in Australia [67.5 percent], but Australia's infant mortality and life expectancy are much better than the UK. A lot of this is cultural, but a lot lies in the details of the respective systems, and in matching those details to the culture.
I wish the all the arguments in the national debate could be this nuanced and thoughtful. Then again, we'd probably call that a discussion rather than an argument.
Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, become critics. They also misapply overly niggling inerpretations of Logical Fallacies in place of arguing anything at all.
: I'm...not? I think you're probably doing the math with my daughter in there?
