Whats that you say hillybill? If I can't pay up you'll be forced to take a Kidney and a testicle.Stick it in your ear!

If there's no penalty, then there's no mandate. If there's no mandate, it costs us all more.

Paul Krugman: "[T]he Obama-type plan [without mandated coverage for all] would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan [with mandated coverage for all] only $2,700."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/opinion/04krugma...

Oh, and need I remind you that today the total cost of medical care is $7,026 per person, much higher than any other industrialized nation.
http://www.ncsl.org/programs/health/finance.htm

What's your preference, garnish wages or we all pay more?

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

Payroll deductions, just like we now have social security and medicare. If you don't work, you probably are on some sort of social program and covered by the government anyway. I do not care how it works, all I know is that it is insane to not have every citizen in this country covered by health insurance. I find it absolutely amazing that our compassionate religious leadership over the past seven years has not taken care of this. It is truely the Christian way to take care of our fellow humans - and it seems that caring for our brothers and sisters health would be at the top of the list of ways to show how much we care for each other. Or, maybe our leaders are just a bunch of hyprocrites who do not give a d@m about anyone or anything that does not directly put money in their own pockets...

Part of what isn't being told here is what is used as the determinant that a person can pay. And, does that insurance cover just the person? Then how about the family cost?

And Carolyn, you are comparing the costs of for-profit plans like those of our Democratic contenders with universal single payer plans the rest of the industrialized world use. That's innacurate.

Anyone knows that insurance costs are relative to the size of the risk pool. The bigger the pool, the lower the cost. So why not utilize the entire population, keep profit out of it all together, and drop the cost dramatically? Seems only Kucinich got that idea correctly.

As anyone who has seen Sicko, or watched the Oprah show featuring Micheal Moore and several others discuss the issue, profit determining health care caused suffering and death for the sake of profit. Is that morally right?

I don't care for either plan, but I would take Obama over Hillary any day of the week.

Garnish wages?

That sound's like "You bad person you," to me. That sort of philosophy is conservative, and if she's willing to do it there, than where else? And who gets the exclusions?

Everyone of us already pay for government subsidized health care every pay check,(For those multitudes of us who still have to work for a living because the opportunities to advance have been eroded) whether we like it or not. So why not be like the rest of the industrialized world, who have smaller costs per capita, and let the coverage extend?

Garnishing wages will only result in further poverty, as a bigger chunk of barely livable income is forcibly taken. This is a cart before the horse solution by an interest group politician.

If they want Americans to be able to afford insurance, why not bolster their ability to make a living wage? To unionize? To stop outsourcing? To rebuild the infrastructure so America can begin manufacturing things again and employ it's own, even under a new concept of capitalism? How about we make it so that Americans can afford the American dream, which includes health insurance?

No thanks Hillary.

If I remember correctly the whole discussion has been centered around Medicare for everyone. I have $200.00 a month deducted from my miserly SS check.

Medicare clients pay for their benefits, some more than others, I'm sure. I would guess that the people who are already on Medicaid (low income) would stay there. I've heard that even Medicaid has some co-pays.

I cannot see a problem with paying a fee based on income for Medicare for everyone. Low income people could be qualified for food stamps or an increase in food stamps to offset these deductions.

One things for sure if we got out of Bush's illegal & illicit war we could afford FREE Medicare for all citizens for a bunch of years.

There is no doubt that our priorities in this country are terribly screwed up.

I think that Hillary's use of the word garnish was the only mistake. She should have said that fees will be deducted from each pay check along with SS & income taxes.

If Clinton's first health-care plan forwarded in 1994 left any room for doubt, this latest admission should remove any possibility of doubt as to what a power-crazed control-freak she and her votaries really are.

Most sincerely,

T. J. Flapsaddle

Are there really people that can afford health insurance but refuse to pay? If you go to the hospital do my taxes pay for your lack of common sense? I do want your wages garnished to pay it back. Its only fair.

In my opinion we have the worst health care in the western world and the most expensive, with the cost increasing exponentially for the last few decades, and the quality decreasing just as fast. At the rate we are going, in the not too distant future, the American health care machine will absorb the entire economy and provide absolutely nothing.

The reasons are simple:

American healthcare is a tangle of interlocking monopolies (it's called "licensing", and it's for your own good...), enforced at the point of a government gun, with all the usual consequences of monopolies and more.

There is no transparency whatsoever: Try to find out, up front, what something is really going to cost you, or what a doctor's record really is. Try to find out what your insurance company really paid for something - or even if they will pay for it until it's too late to back out. Try to find out what pressures your doctor is under, from the insurance companies, from others in his practice, from the local medical community, to mold his practice to their benefit rather than yours.

Then, finally, the whole morass of costs and payments, and price-fixing, and reciprocal referments, and not-so-subtle pressures to prescribe this and not do that, is hidden behind the brick wall of third-party payment.

In short, American health care ranks right up there as one of the most corrupt institutions in history. There is no transaction, no interaction, that is not, somehow, corrupted by money. They talk of "free markets" and "fee for service" but in fact American medicine is the diametric opposite of anything that could be called a free market.

It's not hard to think of fixes for all this but one thing seems clear: The bandaids proposed by the various presidential candidates are all carefully crafted to sound good and look good, but all also carefully crafted to not offend the medical machine. They will not fix anything in the long run.

A true free market might.

MS

If ever we wanted to give the GOP something to scream "nanny state" about, this would be it.

Why can't Hillary come up with something more rational, like if you don't sign up for health insurance a couple of guys will come over to your house and break your kneecaps?

-Wexler

Exxon Mobil (40 billion profit last year) and Halliburton (who even knows how much THEY'VE made)...could pay for healthcare for everyone.

Garnishing wages - bad.

Providing free healthcare paid for by ending the financial toilet that is the Iraq War and having everyone pay a small tax (it would be much less than you're paying for premiums)to pay for it like they do in European countries, is the answer. If you could get the same kind of quality healthcare that congress gets for, say, $100.00 a month or $1200.00 a year, would that work for you? Works for me. Currently, I am paying $600.00 a month, COBRA is ending in 2 weeks. I then won't have health insurance, as I am unemployed and can't afford it.