Nate Nagel wrote:

Pete C. wrote:
Don Klipstein wrote:
In article , HeyBub wrote:
Don Klipstein wrote:
In article , HeyBub
wrote:
Don Klipstein wrote:
In , HeyBub wrote in
part:

The following active duty military personnel do not have insurance:

Army - 543,000
Marines - 158,000
Navy - 335,000
Air Force - 330,000
Total: 1,366,000

We're up to about 25 million already without even considering those
who decline to enroll in an available insurance program.
Is that not 1,366,000 covered by the gubmint, no more inunsured
than those on Medicare and Medicaid?
I guess it depends on how you define "insurance."

In the military, if you get slightly injured (anything less than the
bone sticking out), the medic or the corpsman fixes you up. This is
not much different than the role of the company nurse.
And if they get an illness requiring treatment, they get treated.
These people have medics and corpsmen and do get transported to
hospitals when it is necessary and possible to do so. They are not
among the uncovered roughly 13% of USA's population that are citizens
or legal residents.

They ARE among the 45 million who do not have health insurance.

Once again, absence of health insurance is not the same as absence of health
care. The scare-mongering politicians have NEVER said we have 45 million
people who do not have access to health care.
Maybe I need to clarify: About 12-13% of USA's population is citizens
and legal residents not covered by even so much as what soldiers have.

Roughly 38 million USA citizens and legal residents are "self pay",
with hospital bills roughly quadruple of allowable hospital billing
to Americans (and "coverers" thereof) who obtain "coverage".

Many of these Americans are ones taking their chances at betting on
"which is the least evil" of evils that include at least one
certainly-unaffordable and another only-possibly-bankrupting.

Please keep in kind others saying in this thread how their family costs
$13K annually for private sector healthcare coverage, while professing to
desire "keep gubmint out of it", while USA gubmint spends as high a
percentage of GDP on gubmint spending on healthcare as Canada and most
other industrialized democracies do.

Who wants to maintain American gubmint spending as high a percentage of
GDP on healthcare as Canada has while in addition having private sector
spending $13K for coverage of 1 family that inflates at roughly 10%
annually, in the "name of" "Keep Gubmint out of this"? I do concede that
some and many-influential Americans want such ...

Makes me want to find a way to move to Canada, though someone I would be
married to (under law of all of Canada and a few USA "states") is
unwilling to be uprooted from a metropolitan area where he has family
ties.

- Don Klipstein )

I am currently paying approximately 1.5% of my gross income as my direct
contribution to my health insurance costs, and have very good coverage.

If this claimed wonderful socialized health care materializes, can you
honestly tell me that I will not see either a substantial increase in my
costs to maintain the same quality of coverage, or experience a
substantial loss of coverage?

How much is your employer contributing? It's got to be a lot more than
that.

I expect so, however that number is rather difficult to locate, I'd
guess 60-70% of the total cost. It doesn't really matter much however
since in the event of socialized health care, it is extremely unlikely
that many people will see their gross pay increase be the amount of
their employers former health insurance contributions, i.e. if my
employer is currently paying $4k/yr towards my health insurance, I'm
unlikely to receive that $4k in my pay when my employer provided health
insurance is replaced by the government and my taxes go up to fund it.


I have decent health insurance, but I suspect that may be a big part of
the reason I didn't get a raise this year.

That could be. Raises were delayed several months this year vs. previous
years, but somehow I still managed to get a decent raise (4.73%).


I'm not saying that socialized health care is the answer, but costs are
increasing at an alarming rate.

Yes, they are, and many of the underlying causes for this will not be
addressed at all with socialized health care. Indeed I expect the law of
unintended consequences will go into full swing and there will be
tremendous fallout when the forced contributions to various "community
reinvestment" from insurance companies dry up along with their health
insurance business. These forced contributions have long been a way to
sidestep direct taxation of the populace to fund pet projects, so there
are a lot of those pet projects that will suddenly be unfunded.