Lucrum, may I suggest that it is not in your interest to have your health coverage furnished by your employer. You'd be better off if you had the same coverage at the same rate, but the policy belonged to you and was completely portable. (The employer mandate should not be delayed; it should be dropped! It makes no sense.) However here is the rub, your employer gets a tax deduction, but you don't. You need to be a corporation if you want to be treated well. It is rather bizarre to think that this kludged together thing that y'all call obamacare, and that I call Obamneycare, was actually the brain child of a "conservative" -- i.e., far right wing, whacko, Republican think tank. Come to think of it, it is not so bizarre as I thought! It is modeled after the Swiss system -- the next most expensive healthcare on Earth. The Swiss figured their system out a long time ago, and got it implemented correctly. But of course the U.S. couldn't just be content to copy a successful system. Being the "Strongest" and "Most Free" Nation on Earth, Amurica had to prove its superiority by introducing a few wrinkles into the Swiss version. Most importantly, the Amuricans had to create a system that would preserve the outsized profits of the medical industry. Anything less would have been, well, un-Amurican. The principle behind the Swiss system is the creation of a giant group of all citizens residing in Switzerland. (I haven't a clue what the Swiss do with their sick, non-citizen Turkish street sweepers, but I assume they do the same as we do with our sick, 29-hour a week Walmart stockers,i.e., let them die peacefully on their Salvation Army cots, and replace them with a healthier minimum wage worker.) The Swiss system is mandatory, citizens only -- no Turks -- and includes cradle to grave coverage. The stupid Swiss have to pay only one premium, not two like in the Amurican, private/medicare dual-premium system. In Switzerland, highly regulated -- yuck!-- private insurance companies offer policies with standard coverage, and they are not allowed to make a profit on the standard coverage -- how communist is that! But they can offer supplemental coverage at a profit, perhaps with an enticing extra perk here or there --fondue served bed side-- and prices can vary canton to canton, and carrier to carrier. Those living on Lake Lugano will usually opt to add private room/massuess/concierge coverage. Final result, in Switzerland you get non-cancelable, comprehensive group coverage that is mandatory and the whole country is in the group, young and old alike. Well, as I say, this Swiss plan was the inspiration behind our present day ACA. The Nutso Think Tank, aka "The Heritage Foundation," seized on the Swiss plan, tweaked it to make it more "business friendly" and shopped it around Washington. When the Obama Administration decided to go with the Swiss cum Heritage Foundation plan they could not resist another tweak, and of course, not to be outdone, Congress added their own tweak. That's how we arrived at what is now the Triple Tweaked ACA. The Swiss, however, proved to be smarter than the morons in Washington -- a not difficult accomplishment. What did we do? We put all the healthy into our big group and handed it to the insurance companies. We also put everybody with a paycheck into another pretty big group and had them pay, on top of their big group premium, a second premium (medicare) that we collect for their entire working years and all of their remaining elderly years until they croak -- hence our "business friendly," dual-premium, healthcare melange, or is mirepoix a better descriptor? We put all the sick folks into a special, smaller second group we call medicare and let the insurance companies off the hook-- "business friendly", remember. The medicare group's expenses are paid from the extra premiums they paid on top of their regular insurance, and if the pot of money runs out before they croak, we bilk the taxpayers for the difference. We also generously give these sick and dying folks the opportunity to buy private policies, on top of their medicare premiums that will cover their deductibles, or most of them, and a good part of their drug costs up to the infamous doughnut hole. Of course, the requisite business friendly character of these supplemental insurance policies remains intact. Amurica, god bless her, is the perfect business climate for a health insurer. Insure the healthy and let the sick be covered by a separate policy (medicare) backstopped by the taxpayer. Even the Chamber of Commerce could not think of anything more "business friendly" than this. The other thing we did, which is beyond clever, was to mandate coverage through employers to continue and even provide a tax deduction to encourage it, though once you have universal coverage there is no sense whatsoever in tying insurance to an employer. Certainly the Swiss don't do that! Their coverage is completely portable -- but then what do the Swiss know? They don't even have an aircraft carrier! The Swiss think that it doesn't pay to waste your resources on wars, and that if you leave others alone, they will leave you alone. With that kind of attitude, how on earth do they stay free from weapons of mass destruction. I wouldn't be surprised if there were at this very moment a muslim terrorist ready to prick a sarin balloon right in the middle of the Dolder Grand Lobby! And that folks is the difference between the Swiss system that works, but isn't cheap at 50% less than U.S costs, and the genius of the U.S. version that hands all the healthy to the insurance companies, and leaves the sick to a separate system, medicare, backstopped by the taxpayer. Yes, indeed, Amurica really IS the most business friendly place on Earth!
Put a couple of million crackheads and drive by shooters in switzerland and see what it does to their health care stats. Then get back to us.
See: http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/SEN/Committee/371/ille/library/collin1-e.htm for a detailed account of illicit drug policy in Switzerland. As you will find out, Switzerland does have crack heads, but their approach to the problem is vastly different than in the U.S. Because of our network of for profit prisons, mandatory sentencing, and business friendly law enforcement climate, the U.S. emphasizes interdiction of both traffickers and users, conviction and long term incarceration for manufacturers and traffickers. The incarcerated then become profit centers for the corporate prisons. Very business friendly. In Switzerland the target of law enforcement is not the end user, but rather the manufacture and trafficking. Switzerland does not "enjoy" the profit potential of a network of for profit prisons. The policies of the U.S. and Switzerland with regard to illicit drugs are very different.
I haven't a clue, do you? But that would be an important statistic if you want to compare the two countries drug policies and outcomes. My impression is that Switzerland, because of their more enlightened policies, (see the report I linked to) does not have anything like the drug-associated crime problem that the U.S. has. I have seen estimates as high as 90% for the fraction of crimes, mainly burglary and robbery, tied to illicit drug use in the U.S. If we could cut that rate by even half with a more enlightened drug policy, imagine how insurance rates could come down and how much our personal safety would improve. But that would not be business friendly, and the prison corporations and the Southern Baptists would fight any such changes. Our American penchant for uniquely American solutions to our problems is wrong headed. Instead, we should look around the world, find out what works and what doesn't, and copy what works. I'll add that, one has to consider, of course, not just crack, but all highly addicting drugs. We are on the way to solving the marijuana issue, thank goodness. But we have a long way to go with the highly addicting drugs.
First let me applaud piezoe for a couple of detailed and enlightening posts. I may not agree with all the material but it certainly is thought provoking. I would like to address some of the information about illicit drug policy in Switzerland. For addicts, the policies in Switzerland are focused on treatment rather than jail time. However (as outlined in the provided link below) large-scale drug dealing and traffickng is harshly treated in their criminal justice system. The size of the overall problem is small in Switzerland with under 4000 drug dealing arrests per year and under 50,000 drug possesion arrests per year (these are sent for rehabilation typically). One thing that should be noted is that most of the drug dealing involves non-Swiss citizens. As noted in the link - "It should be noted that of a total of 3,021 drug trafficking cases, 78% involved foreigners and 22% Swiss citizens." Most of these cases are criminally prosecuted and the drug dealer permanently expelled from the country. If the U.S. has a drug problem this small it would be easier to handle. Especially if we had a policy of expelling all non-citizen drug dealers with the expectation that they would never return.
You're not going to get an argument from me, that's for sure. As a Libertarian, I am for the legalization of all drugs. Let people do whatever the hell they want with their own bodies, as long as there is no effect to me. The Dutch do something similar - unless there is violent crime, drugs are essentially ignored. They just emptied out a whole bunch of prisons for non-violent drug offenders. At first, people will go nuts. Then it'll be no big deal. The drug trade will be taxed, guns and gangs will essentially go bankrupt and capitalism will solve most of the issues.