Hi Possi:

That was a very well-spent two cents, it was worth a lot more than that!

Quote:

For us personally, it will hurt because since we will have a choice of the government coverage, our company coverage will be dropped. I expect this time next year we won't be nearly as well off.



I worry about that too. If the government creates a viable alternative to the existing very profitable health care insurance companies that now exist...

meaning a cheaper, not-for-profit one, that is designed to create competition, to have the effect of getting those insurance companies to no longer be a monopoly consortium (which they are in fact, because since 1945 they've been granted an exemption from anti-trust laws, via the McCarran-Ferguson Act, there are only a few other businesses that have a similar exemption, one is Major League Baseball)

....it will have some repercussions, perhaps not ones we can predict accurately at this point, but the one you mention has occurred to me, that some businesses might not choose to pay for coverage to their employees, and those employees could very well end up with a lesser plan than they do now

but on the other hand, they would be paying much less for that coverage, so perhaps the deduction that currently comes out of our paychecks would compensate, as well as the other portion of your insurance payments that the employer covers (which is where this would help us compete economically with other countries)

or maybe I'm just being too optimistic...

A lot of these speculations depend on the drafting of the final bill, which is now being melded together from the 5 different that currently exist

But in any case, this won't be happening next year, the earliest that any health care reform would take effect would be in 2013

Dow