Marriage Penalties for Healthcare

Getting married? Already married? Obama has a wedding present for you as part of his healthcare plan - stiff penalties for dual-income households. Steve Moore reports in yesterday's Political Diary how mandatory coverages will cost married couples (and that's not rich married couples - it's all of them):

Take two low-wage workers who are considering marriage. In 2016, if each
has an income $11,800, they would each have to pay $248 as singles for
government-approved health insurance. Married, their joint income climbs to
$23,600 and they would have to pay $1,109 -- a ding of more than $600
annually.

Middle-class workers could get hit even harder. According to the
Congressional Budget Office, a single individual earning $35,400 -- three times
the poverty rate -- would be obligated to pay $3,611 for mandatory health
insurance. But two such individuals, if married, would lose their eligibility
for government subsidies and their mandatory health insurance payments would
rise to $13,100 -- a whopping $5,878 annual marriage penalty.

That's not how I want to spend my family budget.

The freedoms you will lose (yes, you)

This Fortune article is the single best piece I've read on the healthcare bills coming out of Congress. The article identifies "five freedoms" you will lose if the current legislations becomes law. This isn't think tank propaganda. This is a major business publication taking an honest look at the bill.

[T]he Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.

I didn't know a lot of the things cited in this article and I consider myself fairly well informed on the healthcare debate. I wonder if our legislators have any idea this stuff is in there? Given the hesitation to pass anything, they must have at least an inkling.

Obama says you'll be able to keep your current plan if you like it, but you won't - it just may take a year or two before you're kicked off. He says he's not going to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, but I think forcing young people to pay for coverage they don't need qualifies as a tax increase.

Read this article and see what's going on. If you aren't alarmed by the end of it, then read it again because you missed something.

The Healthcare Fight

Could breast cancer survivors be a strong and as-yet-untapped ally in the fight to stop socialized medicine?

Some of those solutions are already the order of the day in that single-payer paradise, Britain, whose National Health Service doesn't even provide for annual screening mammograms -- something U.S. physicians strongly recommend to detect and treat breast cancer before it becomes virulent. The National Health Service allows mammograms only every three years, and then only for women between 50 and 70. The service's guidelines recognize that risk rises with age, but women over 70 must nevertheless explicitly ask to continue having the triennial scans -- a not-so-subtle way of discouraging the screening.

Early screening, of course, has saved millions of lives and will continue to do so until it isn't allowed. Why would we want to give that up? And don't expect this to be limited to necessary exams for women, either.

This comes from a L.A. Times opinion piece that provides a very good articulation of what "comparative effectiveness research" really means and the possible implications of proposed legislation. Read it and know what we're looking at.

Good to know that we have a president who will offer us the moon and the stars - but not a hip replacement for his grandmother.