Universal coverage is only part of the issue. Personally, I am a lot more concerned about skyrocketing costs that I've been paying for. My take home pay certainly hasn't kept up with the skyrocketing expenses for insurance and copays.

I don't find the insurance companies to be a sympathetic group. They smile while they quadruple premiums and send me a new insurance card with ginormous copays. I guess it would be impolite to want the government to address this hidden tax on my income?

If we didn't have public colleges, I bet private colleges would be even more expensive. Especially if they had lobbyists dumping money on congress to prevent the creation of any public postsecondary education.

Power grab? What do you call it when to get health care I have to let a company reach that deep into my bank account? And to keep allowing themselves to do that, they manipulate congress? What about the corporate power grab?

Just because a plant is natural doesn't mean it's good to eat. And just because something is happening in a market doesn't mean the consumer isn't going to be economically raped by it.

We need health care to be stable, not only for the health of our citizens, but for the economy. This is a national security issue at this point. I daresay our security depends more on a stable economy and health system than it depends on many other huge budget expenditures.

-JP

The LA Times had an article addressing the skyrocketing costs of health insurance this morning. Most of the reason for increased premiums are increased health costs. The article ended by saying the ultimate way for government to control costs was to impose caps on what doctors and hospitals could charge. (I don't really think we want to go down that road).

The only other way to dramatically bring down costs is for people to stay healthier longer. Stop smoking, lose weight, exercise. A huge percentage of our health care costs are due to chronic conditions and many of those chronic conditions are due to obesity.

It's the elephant in the room (pardon the pun) that few politicians want to talk about.

A HUGE percentage of healthcare costs are administrative -- paperwork. One local hospital administrator was on a local radio show yesterday. She estimated their administrative costs at 25%.

For physicians it's even higher.

This myth that the fat people are causing the skyrocketing health care costs is another one that is just tailor made to the "everyone else needs to be responsible" crowd. I like to call it "hide your problems behind the overweight."

Those who say people need to be personally responsible to this national problem by somehow being thinner (ignoring the fact that there are plenty of genetic factors that govern health and weight and that lifestyle is only part of the picture) i invite to please take the 0.5-inch step to the left and join me in saying that we need to be financially responsible for universal healthcare. It's only a small rhetorical difference.

This cant of personal responsibility doesn't seem to extend to practical real-world policies, like using the government to help collectively bargain for better prices. We are personally responsible to find solutions to difficult problems, and personally responsible to not ignore that some other countries have done a pretty good job of showing us good and bad examples that ought to be a guide if we could get past people screaming "socialism."

Personal responsibility is much easier when you can point to someone else.

-JP

Not liking an answer doesn't make it not true. A big percentage of health care costs is due to smoking and obesity. And if genetics were the biggest part of the obesity problem, the percentage of obese people would be the same generation after generation. Instead it's rising and rising fast. Europeans are much thinner than are Americans of European descent. Traveling in Europe, it's easy to pick out the Americans simply by our weight.

Having the government run health care will mean that the government will tell you how to live your life one way or another. The one who pays the piper calls the tune.

With government health care we are headed for the nanny statism big time. I would support high sales taxes on sugary and high-fat foods not only to raise revenues to pay for healthcare but also to discourage their consumption. I also support high taxes on cigarettes and alcohol for the same reasons. I'd also support tax benefits for healthy behavior.

I wish I had the link available, but I recently read about a hospital which had planned a huge expansion to their maternity department - in the neighborhood of $80 million due to an upswing in births in their area. They hired an efficiency agency to evaluate their current needs and were advised to hire one nurse/day shift just to handle discharges. The improvement in efficiency made the expansion unnecessary.

All waste isn't fraud. We need to look at what we're doing now in providing health care much more than we need to be pointing fingers at individuals. If we restructure our health care system, physicians might even have time to work with people with poor health habits.

realtraveller Wrote:With government health care we are headed for the nanny statism big time. I would support high sales taxes on sugary and high-fat foods not only to raise revenues to pay for healthcare but also to discourage their consumption. I also support high taxes on cigarettes and alcohol for the same reasons. I'd also support tax benefits for healthy behavior.

Your intentions are good, and I like the way you're looking for a practical solution, but there are problems with this. There's a whole conversation to be had here about corn and corn subsidization, but I would recommend "The Omnivore's Dilemma" for that. Short version: our national security in the past has relied on a fungible source of cheap calories. But the overabundance needs to be used if it is to be maintained. And it comes to us in the form of corn derivatives in many of our highly processed foods.

(Back in the days before food science gave us our processed food magic, they just made these excess calories into whiskey. And that, among other things, led to prohibition...)

These foods tend to be a LOT cheaper per calorie. They're also not very healthy. But their cheapness means that lower income people rely on them disproportionately.

A tax like that to fund health care would amount to funding health care on the backs of the poor. Yes -- high fructose corn syrup consumption and fat consumption is somewhat to blame for health problems, but malnourishment is no tea party either.

Perhaps there is a way to do it equitably; I'm no policy expert. But I think it would be a sensitive thing to craft.

-JP

drmomentum Wrote:These foods tend to be a LOT cheaper per calorie. They're also not very healthy. But their cheapness means that lower income people rely on them disproportionately.

A tax like that to fund health care would amount to funding health care on the backs of the poor. Yes -- high fructose corn syrup consumption and fat consumption is somewhat to blame for health problems, but malnourishment is no tea party either.

Perhaps there is a way to do it equitably; I'm no policy expert. But I think it would be a sensitive thing to craft.

-JP

Cigarettes are currently highly taxed and the poor tend to smoke more than the rich. But no one argues that that is somehow disproportionately unfair to the poor. But it's also been shown that the more expensive cigarettes are the less people smoke, particularly kids. You can't smoke 'em if you can't afford 'em.

Just from looking around and from what I read, the poor tend to be fatter than the rich also. Yes, veggies and fruits do cost more per calorie. And I don't think that sales taxes on fatty or sugary food alone could pay for the health problems of the obese. But if making them more expensive got the poor, obese people to change their eating habits, it would make the obese less obese and also contribute to paying for the health problems of obesity.

Comparing a tax on food, which one needs to live, to cigarettes, which are not necessities, is not fair.

I agree with JP on this. My grocery budget is $30 a week, and I try to do that without crappy food. But really, it's so much cheaper to buy English Muffins, or most "regular" loaves of bread than it is to buy the good stuff without high fructose syrup. Same with the cans of tomato sauce I can get for a buck, verses the expensive jars of sauce. Some weeks I can't afford to eat the way I want to eat. Do you think you should take more of my food budget to pay for fat people? I'm barely feeding the two of us as it is.

And, I'm not poor by any means. Neither Kevin nor I make what would be considered poverty level pay.

So really, where do you want truly poor people to come up with more money to pay for food?

I think that the first tax being discussed is on sugary sodas. Not a necessity either.

Last fall, I spent a week in Austin TX and another week in Cincinnatti. In both places, I got lost while driving and ended up in some obviously poverty-stricken parts of town. One thing that I noticed in both locations was the lack of grocery stores. Lots of convenience stores and gas stations with deli counters. No stores where families could stock up on staples, fresh fruits and vegies, etc.

It's not always a matter of choice. If it's a 45 minute bus ride across town to find a place with a better selection, a mom with small children and no car may have to make the best of what's available.

Last year, I read a very interesting research brief (published before the full research article is peer-reviewed and published) by a group of researchers at the Obesity Prevention Research Center in St. Louis, working with 555 parent/pre-adolescent child teams. They measured differences in two means:

1. child BMI calculated from actual measurement
2. Parent BMI calculated from self-report height and weight.

They collected data on both parent and child fruit and vegie intake, household income, food purchase behavior, and parent perception on cost of purchasing fresh fruits and vegies. They didn't find a difference in in fruit and vegetable intake by income status, but they did find that children in households with comparatively low spending on overall groceries consumed less fruits and vegetables on a daily basis. Finally they found that parental perceptions of fruits and vegetable costs were associated with intake of fruit and vegetable among both children and parents.

Rather than taxing the cheap foods, I'd like to see the kind of subsidies on fruits and veggies that we have on corn. Wonder WHY corn is cheap? Your tax dollars at work.

My niece attend art school on the edge of downtown L. A. Not one of the better neighborhoods to say the least. But there are grocery stores with lots of fruit and vegetables. Somehow she got by and she's a vegetarian.

The problem with imposing junk food taxes is deciding what is junk food. Some things are easy: sugary soda, but presumably not diet soda with no calories. Any premade baked goods, candy, chips, Doritos, etc. But what about pretzels? Or cake mix? There's high fat tortillas and no-fat tortillas. It could get really difficult for retailers.

As for fruits and vegetable, farmers already get lots of federal subsidies. I think that if you had two lines, one giving away apples and the other giving away Hostess apple pies, the apple pie line would be longer. People just like the high sugar, high fat stuff.

Well--around here you would be hard pressed to find a head of iceberg lettuce under $2, or a pound of apples under $3. We do not have fruit "stands" nearby, only grocery stores. Last week I bought apples on sale for $.99 a pound and thought it was a steal. At $2.50 for a pound of broccoli I do have to second think do I want to spend that much $$???

I am fortunate that I can afford to pay the prices..but I remember years ago when my husband was out of work and it was extremely difficult to pay for fresh fruits and veggies. We lived in central PA then and were able to grow many things in the summer and that offset some of the cost. Even having "fruit/veggie" mini marts available I could not afford to go there and pay the cost. Farmers may get subsidies but they do not always equal a discount to the consumer.

realtraveller Wrote:My niece attend art school on the edge of downtown L. A. Not one of the better neighborhoods to say the least. But there are grocery stores with lots of fruit and vegetables. Somehow she got by and she's a vegetarian.

None of what you said there indicates that she was at poverty level. Maybe she was... but I know I was never in my life as rich as I was in college. I had more money to waste then than at any other time in my life.

The L. A. Times has an editorial today on the practical problems of imposing a soda tax.

Weighing a soda tax -- latimes.com

The editorial points out that apple juice has virtually the same calories as soda with about the same nutritional value. The editorial ends by suggesting a tax on large restaurant portions.

Maybe next the White House will have to have a 'food czar'.

Obama really has one word. He will do what he says and make the best out of it. As what realtraveller had said, we all believe him and surely, your trust will not destroy.

I beg your pardon?

I think we've been visited Sara Palin's and Yoda's love child.

LOL! What is the love child named? Frost? Birch? Algebra? Salmon Roe?

Surely a Palin baby would not really be named Andrea. Andrea has to be a nickname!