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So interesting that I can come on this site and find what's basically a very good discussion that reveals a spectrum of thought and opinion - and glad to find it, by the way.
I think that the angry poster - nasty? - has some positions that hold merit. It's just that it's conveyed in a manner that's not conducive to getting folks to agree. Seems to lead to just shouting noise past the other's ear.
Health care provided by the employer was one of the ways a company could gain the loyalty of an experienced work force, back when jobs were plentiful and there was real competition for you and I to join one company over the other.
How many of us are old enough to have heard our parents or even our peers (if we're of a certain age) say that they would leave XYZ but that they couldn't get a job anywhere else that matched the benefits of their current employer?
Can you imagine an auto worker leaving their job to go into another field with an HMO that the rest of the industrialized world is familiar with? I lived in the Detroit 'burbs for a few years and sat in waiting rooms, watched patients check out at the window and pay next to nothing for their care, while I paid a co-pay that was more in line with what everyone else outside of the UAW universe paid.
If you saw that on a regular basis, you'd understand what a "cadillac" plan is.
Now I have private insurance, for which I pay about $8500 a year. I have a $2500 deductible, yet the proposed plan determined that I had a "cadillac" plan for which I'd have to pay taxes. I can assure you, at my age, with private insurance, many of those in my age bracket pay that much for insurance. (My employer gives me about half of that to help with the premiums, and if I raised my deductible to $5000 it would drop my premium by about $1800 a year)
One of the things that always seem to be absent in these comparisons to European plans is that their governments have much higher tax rates than the US, and they don't have the tort situation we have, and moreover, they don't spend the billions and billions we've obligated ourselves to militarily to defend....the Europeans. Sure frees up dollars to spend on other things, like health services.
Now, as to illegals being in the US and some - gasp - having jobs, I have two things -
number one, that's changed a good bit. Otherwise, they have jobs that Americans should have to reduce our 10% unemployment rate. Secondly, if they do have jobs, it doesn't matter. The conversation should stop at the word illegal. Otherwise eliminate the world illegal. Either it means something, or it doesn't. Change the law or observe it.
That's my two cents. Carry on.
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