Eric Hanneken's Library tagged socialism →  View Popular

What does this mean? I see two possibilities: The most likely is
that progressives are latching on to these criticisms because
they're now so angry that they're ready to do anything to kill the
bill — including admit what they had to have known all along, which
is that these criticisms actually have a lot of merit.

The second, while less likely, is more disturbing: Many
progressives who backed this bill throughout the year had no idea
what was in it. They hated Republicans, heard endless
public-option hosannas from their leaders, and believed they'd
found a way to start the move toward single payer.

Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding.  But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation.  It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.

If someone sold you a house, or a car, or a mutual fund this way, we would put them in jail.

In the U.S. you
have to fight to get on the appointment schedule of a doctor
within your health insurance network (I’ll conservatively put the
average wait time at five days), then have him or her scrawl
something unintelligible on a slip of paper, which you take to a
drugstore to exchange for your medicine. You might pay the doc
$40, but then his office sends you a separate bill for the visit,
and for an examination, and those bills also go to your insurance
company, which sends you an adjustment sheet weeks after the
doctor’s office has sent its third payment notice. By the time
it’s all sorted out, you’ve probably paid a few hundred dollars
to three different entities, without having a clue about how or
why any of the prices were set.

In France, by contrast, you walk to the corner pharmacist, get
either a prescription or over-the-counter medication right away,
shell out a dozen or so euros, and you’re done. If you need a
doctor, it’s not hard to get an appointment within a day or
three, you make payments for everything (including X-rays) on the
spot, and the amounts are routinely less than the co-payments for
U.S. doctor visits.

As the largest private insurer pulls out over a three-year period (that period negotiated with the state), Citizens will get an even larger share of Florida’s property insurance.

Everybody in Florida knows Citizens is a fiscal time bomb.  Already, every Florida insurance policy (on homes, boats, cars, etc.) pays a surcharge that goes to Citizens, but Citizens still doesn’t have sufficient reserves to weather a major hurricane.  When one comes, Florida taxpayers will be on the hook for the bill.