Funny, can you tell me the difference between marginal tax rate and effective tax rate?
The top 1% of earners in the 1950’s paid an effective tax rate of 16.9%. Higher marginal income tax rates didn’t necessarily result in a higher income tax burden for the wealthiest taxpayers. In fact, as the top marginal income tax rate has fallen, the top 1 percent’s income tax burden has increased. This diatribe has been repeated often by people who are clueless how taxes actually work.
Source for this?
Last time I checked we didn’t have age limits for actual treatment and can’t turn away a serious health emergency from any ER regardless of ability to pay.
Oh of course, and I wouldn’t want the VA operating on my dog.
You would still have the people with money getting the good care and the rest would get the shit the government provides that would continually get worse. Thinking the government can run anything is idiotic.
They can’t even run the post office or social security or anything else in the black, but we want them to run healthcare? LOL.
The federal government couldn’t run a whorehouse without bankrupting it.
I buy that it wouldn’t likely be all that efficient. What I wonder is would their inefficiency end up costing more than the profits of the insurance / healthcare system?
I think there is a lot of space that could be explored regarding health care. We get mostly options from two positions. I think other solutions exist.
For example, I’d be okay with private insurance / self pay for most routine visits, and Rx. Life threatening stuff covered by the government. After a certain age, its either only treating symptoms like pain, not the actual disease, unless you want to self pay or have your own high end insurance. These things would eliminate a lot of the congestion / quality issues people are worried about, while ensuring people who get cancer get treatment.
The problem resides with government being extremely wasteful and unable to balance a budget. We are how many trillions in debt right now?
The European model keeps skyrocketing every year as a percentage of their GDP. By 2040 it is going to gobble a large share of the entire GDP.
I think there needs to be change, but it needs to start with tort reform and go from there. Giving more power and money to an entity that has proven time and time again they can’t manage a lemonade stand is just - I don’t even know.
There might be a happy medium, but I doubt it. People in general suck and greed is never going away - even in the European model.
Like every other progressive pie-in-the-sky social experiment, there’s only one way to see if it will work. You have to run it.
Maybe this is the time government competence will finally shine through and everyone will look back at how silly they were for raising their concerns. You know, just like every other transformational and irreversible progressive social experiment that’s worked exactly as advertised throughout history.
Just curious. Has anyone here worked in the government bureaucracy? I’m not talking about military or even police or teaching, but in the actual administrative portion of local, state or federal government? If so, what are your impressions?
I consulted for State of Maine Department of Administrative and Financial Services for a year during their first attempt to upgrade their HR software. Private businesses manage to successfully implement this software routinely. That doesn’t make it simple to do, but it does mean that there’s a well-understood methodology that, if applied, successfully implements the new software and transitions the organization off of the old software.
It’s so easy, even some of the better-run government entities have done it.
State of Maine was unable to do this, instead blaming the software vendor and implementation partner through a lawsuit. The city of Los Angeles did something similar with the best ERP software in the world, essentially claiming SAP doesn’t work. SAP handles something like 40 percent of the worlds’ journal entries on a daily basis, and computers are still good at math. It works very well if you’re smart and disciplined enough as an organization to implement it properly. The City of Los Angeles has another opinion on the best business software in the world. They say it is garbage software. Who knows, maybe it somehow breaks down in perfect weather.
State of Maine has since tried again with new software and new partners, failing a second time and suing the next round of vendors. We’re left with one guy - ONE SINGLE DUDE - in the entire state who knows the legacy programming language to keep the wheels on the bus of our current software solution.
Maybe my grandparent’s generation could have administered government-run healthcare, but I have no reason to believe that, if implemented today, it would be anything other than an abject disaster and deeply regrettable expansion of government to the benefit of few and the detriment of many.
Let’s get back to the basics of administration, like running modern software, holding people accountable and re-thinking the benefits of having seven members of one family on a project that wasted 40 million dollars of tax money with absolutely nothing to show for it.
Doctors who work in public healthcare aren’t really forced to take anything. They can choose to work for public or open their own practice in the private sector.
Some work both in public and private.
One issue is that most, of course, will choose private, obviously more financially rewarding.
Which causes the public sector to struggle to find doctors, and then have to pay “external” doctors to work some hours, which in the end is going to be more expensive than if they payed “internal” doctors a higher salary to begin with.
So, since most doctors do choose to go private, some countries will rely on foreign Doctors from countries like Cuba, Ukraine, etc.
It’s probably easier than in NYC or New Jersey. When I was there people walked around with shotguns going to or coming from hunting.
And they can’t refuse to help a person.
Or the effects of taking it without lube for centuries.
With notable exceptions.
Seems to be the same in everywhere, govermnent workers often aren’t subjected to any scrutiny or face no accountability.
I have a good friend who’s, truth be told, incompetent, irresponsable, careless, unable to be anywhere on time. How is someone like this going to be able to hold down a job?
Well, landed a job working for the city, that’s how.
So you are saying you have a free health care then.
If someone is incapable of forming a stance they support, but will shit on EVERY other position, they are a troll. Please stop feeding them.
The government does exactly this by spending money to protect your freedom and having troops quartered elsewhere
The government is literally the only entity that can violate that provision of the constitution. The ONLY thing they have to not violate is not to quarter troops in my house. That’s 100% free.
Depends on how you look at it
To not do a thing is always free if you look at it that way. But there are opportunity costs to not doing stuff if you look at it another way.
Zecarlo was saying that any rights being upheld will ultimately have some sort of cost if you look hard enough to find it, which I agree is true
Your seemingly sarcastic, rhetorical rebuttal had a weakness to it
If you insist on looking only at the immediate financial costs, then fine
To not eat will only cost one his life eventually, but not a single penny immediately. That’s not the best way to get down to the bottom of what’s really happening
Literally every economist ever will agree that there is no such thing as a free lunch. There will always be a cost; if not time or money, perhaps opportunity… one can find a cost for anything anywhere, no matter what.
Of course you can take zecarlo’s point to absurd extremes, but that doesn’t really make the point valid.
If a nation decides it’s ok to pay for healthcare via taxes and is ok knowing that some people who will benefit do not pay taxes; if they do this because they believe it’s a right then it isn’t right or wrong. They made the choice and rights are a human construct. There are no God given rights and looking at the Bible, civil rights as we know them them don’t even exist.
I should be able to opt out of forced bullshit like healthcare, medicare, social security, etc imo.
I don’t need daddy government providing for me. I can do that myself. I don’t need government wasting my money when I can plan far better for myself.
Thanks to the government.
Can I get tax money back if the government decides to start a war I don’t agree with? I don’t want my tax dollars going to subsidize corn or soy so can I get a refund for that as well? I don’t like my taxes going to support a state university’s sports program if I don’t watch the sport.