I’ll have something up after class tonight if you’re still interested.

here’s my far-from-comprehensive list:

Let’s start with health insurance. I have a couple of issues here. First, I’ve never understood why health coverage is so heavily linked to your job. I can understand it if you (the company) can afford to do it, but forcing companies to do so? That doesn’t make much sense to me. Not only are you making it more difficult for small businesses (on the job creation side), but it also becomes an issue if you get fired or want to leave your job.

As far as ways to fix it… As I understand it, there are certain tax incentives and/or preferences towards having insurance through your employer. Why shouldn’t a self-employed or unemployed person paying for health insurance get those same benefits? So that requires tweaking the tax code.

Kind of along the same lines is encouraging the use of HSAs. I can’t admit to being completely familiar with these, but the idea gets at what I’m talking about above – allowing people to keep more of their own money (tax-free) to spend it on health care costs.

The third issue is the regulations that prevent people from purchasing health insurance across state lines. Any way of encouraging competition in the health insurance market is a good thing.

My final point is more general – it strikes me that this has been and is becoming even more of an insurance problem when we should be moving away from that. Basic things like seeing a doctor for a check-up and buying certain prescriptions seemingly shouldn’t require insurance. I’m not sure enough why basic procedures are so costly. That strikes me as being a supply-side issue, though, and I’m not as in-tune as I should be in that area. I have to believe, though, that regulations are in some way distorting the pricing system.

Seeing that I’d rather have incremental progress than no progress at all, I wouldn’t be completely opposed to a minimum safety net, particularly for those who truly can’t afford health insurance. This would mean beefing up Medicaid, not only in a monetary sense but also fixing the fraud that occurs in most redistribution programs.

A good friend works in a ER in St. Paul Minnesota and inexplicably there are a ton of Somali refugees who go to the hospital for every little thing and demand MRIs. There are also a ton of ex-chicago welfare recipients up there as well, I guess they get more money there or something like that but it sounds like ‘we’(proverbial) shipped them there on buses which I think is a funny way to remedy the problem.
 
But since we werent turning the cock suckers away when they showed up at the hospital pregnant or with a knot on their head it makes sense to me to have a plan that encompasses them.

the fact that they tend to do well?

the sole intent of my comment was to be humorous by quoting lee elia because the previous 2 comments included “15%” and “cub fans”.