Originally Posted by
Henry V
I almost entirely agree Gerry, but would add that providing coverage for everyone should lower the cost per individual since more presumably will get preventative care and there will be fewer visits to the emergency room for basic care which is a large cost in the system.
It does not solve the problem of 12 million illegals who will still be visiting the emergency rooms, and will not be covered by Obamacare. We need to solve that problem with immigration reform.
I'm not entirely sure that the emergency room visits are at the core of the rising cost of health care. Have you found numbers on that Henry?
There will also be a lot of this coverage that is subsidized. As I recall, families of four, will be eligible for subsidy up to a substantial income limit.
I agree that the actions should be offsetting. The increased sales of the products because more people have insurance should offset the tax.
Yet, historically, tax on a product/service has been passed onto the consumer.
If medical devices lower long term costs to individuals there could be some savings in total health care costs too.
Not totally sure this works in all scenarios. In the UK, cheapest of all is to not replace an old person's hip at all ... and that often is the option that the old person is left with.
Regarding your first two sentences, the thing you are leaving out of the profit margin equation is the fact that government benefits like Medicare and food stamps are directly subsidizing the profit margins of many large and small businesses. A lot of the people on food stamp and medicaid work full and part time jobs at low wages. For example, do a search on "walmart medicaid" or "walmart food stamps". You find facts like:
- 20% of the employees at the nation's largest employer do not have health insurance
That would mean that 80% of them do have health insurance. If we consider that many of those employees may be part-time, then that doesn't appear to be too bad, on the face of it.
- Wal-Mart's employees rely on $2.66 billion in government help every year, or about $420,000 per store.
How would that compare to the amount Walmart pays in taxes each year? I don't know. Just wondering.
- In state after state, Wal-Mart employees are the top recipients of Medicaid.
That is not surprising since most of the jobs are probably low-skill, low-paying jobs ... but those may be the only jobs available to those employees.
- As many as 80 percent of workers in Wal-Mart stores use food stamps.
Could they get a better job somewhere else?
- Ironically, WalMart is the largest recipient of food stamp dollars. For example in OK over half of all food stamp dollars are spent at walmart.
Is there a reason for that?
- The costs to taxpayers is $202 million annually for medicaid coverage alone.
-Wal-Mart does increase Medicaid expenditures for the rest of us by roughly $898 per worker
- Walmart makes 15 billion in profit each year.
Do we know whether these people working for Walmart would be receiving benefits if they worked somewhere else in a job for which they are qualified? Would everyone be better off if Walmart didn't employ so many people? Would it cost more to provide benefits to these workers if they were not working for Walmart?
Is Walmart to blame for having available many low-skill jobs?
Why is it essentially wrong for Walmart to make a profit if they do so by providing a fair exchange of product and/or service for those who wish to purchase those products/services? Do other similar retailers provide better benefits and wages? There are probably some retired people that are benefiting from their early investments in Walmart stock, placing less burden on social services because they have such income from that investment.
Could these Walmart employees find better jobs elsewhere?
I guess that they have decided that 15 billion is their margin so that is a good justification to pass many of their employees health care and food costs on to the rest of us or else they will "go out of business". Great system. Especially when the right wing entertainment complex has most of the people around this board convinced that it is all the employees fault for being on food stamps.
Isn't Walmart free to earn as much as it can legally earn? If we don't approve of them, we can shop elsewhere.
I would bet that many employees at Papa John's follow this same pattern. The question to ask, is whether it is worth paying $0.07 more per pizza or losing that much in revenue so that the employees have some health coverage? The owner of Papa John's apparently does not think it is worth it. Actually, from what I have read, he has no intentions of providing coverage, he is outraged that he will have to pay the penalty.
The public can voice its disapproval by buying less pizza from Papa John, and more from Pizza Hut ... or others.
So, are you concerned about these subsidize? and how do you propose that we stop subsidizing the profit margins of these companies by the government providing their employees with medical insurance and food stamps?
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