For those that do not know, President Obama has been making daily speeches touting the need to pass his health care bill before congress goes on vacation in august. What follows are a number of points citizens should consider when forming an opinion on the issue.
1) Whenever government gets involved with some entity the price goes up and the quality goes down. One need look only to the government's involvement in the school system to understand how ineffective their involvement truly is. $25,000 per student is what California spends on an annual basis to "educate" children in its public schools. A home schooled child in Texas costs their parents roughly $700. Why such a large disparity?
2) Government-run health care is too expensive. With the tax rate already approaching 50%, this health care bill would push that rate upwards of 55% of gross income for the highest tax bracket. With high-income individuals working almost three days a week for the government, they will be less likely to have the financial motivation to expand their business. Moreover, the individuals who are in the next tax bracket down, would have less of a motivation to work harder and expand their business.
3) Government is not good at running a business. If anyone has ever worked for the public sector they understand this point ad nauseam. For example, the DMV--enough said. The post office, just like the DMV, has horrible lines and is completely incompetent. How much is a stamp now? Big government is not the answer, Bush proved that and Obama is doing the same. Forget about the partisan bickering, both parties legislate in a similar manor.
4) Canada does NOT have great health care. As much as the media wants you to believe Canada has a wonderful health care system, they are simply wrong. 15% of Canada's population is not covered under any policy. The wait times of 4-6 weeks to have a procedure are similar to those in the US. However, these wait times do not include the number of steps one must go through to reach the doctor who finally decides on an operation. For example, if you have a stomach ache you will likely go to your internal medicine doctor, who then sends you to a specialist, who then orders some tests and want to see you back when the results are in. After seeing the specialist, he determines that you need an operation and then wants to set a date. All the Canadian system counts as a waiting period is from the last doctor visit until the procedure. Unfortunately, the steps leading up to this final doctor visit regularly take months. Alas, "there are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics."
5) Why become a doctor? Imagine, you graduate medical school with $200,000 in loans and now you want to become a family doctor (FD)--something that few want to do today. The average salary for and (FD) is $135,000 per year. With a tax rate of 45%, your income is down to $74,250. With interest on your loans at 5%, you want to pay your principal of $10,000. However, since you now have a job, and you believe interest rates will rise in the future, you decide paying off some of you debt would be a wise idea. Therefore, you pay another 10k on top of the principal. Your left with $54,250. Factor in rent of $1500 (we hope young doctors would not be stupid enough to buy at the present time)car payment of $400, food cost of $500 and that leave our young doctors with $24,650 or $2,540 per month of disposable income.
If Obama were to reduce the cost of health care by forcing doctors to take a government option which pays them 20% less per patient, our young ambitious doctor is looking at taking home $1,643 per month. This begs the question: why become a doctor? It's certainly not for the money.
6) Too expensive. The 8% tax that would be applies to businesses that do not provide health care to their employees is a terrible idea. This would absolutely kill small business. How is a small retail shop--that has already seen its sales decline 20-30% over the past year--going to afford to lose another 8% of their revenue? They simply will close-up shop and their employees will be added to an already burgeoning unemployment list.
This health care bill will have negative effects on our fragile economy. Small businesses provide more than 70% of the employment in this country. Most of their cost are associated with labor, not health care like the White House wants people to believe. Large companies such as GM and GE do not provide jobs because they are a financial juggernaut that uses its money to make money. However, someone must do the work and produce a good that can be sold for the investor to make their profit. If we cannot pay the worker to do the work because of taxes, then the entire system collapse.
This is the wrong bill at the wrong time, and if it passes we will be in more trouble than we are at the present time.
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