I can't help but scratch my head at the math skills of the moronic Liberals in California

[bodyforlife]

Yep, the morons are at it again! hno:

Democrats' single-payer health-care dream just became a nightmare

• A new study by the California State Senate shows that single payer health care would cost more than the entire current state budget.
• That means everything else that Californians want from their government would have to take a backseat to health care.
• Hopefully, this report will start to make our national health care debate more economically realistic.

Jake Novak | @jakejakeny
Wednesday, 24 May 2017 | 2:23 PM ETCNBC.com

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Ronen Tivony | NurPhoto | Getty Images
Participants in the Medicare for All Rally in Los Angeles, California on February 4, 2017.

Maybe we should rename so-called single payer health care and call it "single slayer."
Because as the politicians in California just found out, providing government paid-for health care isn't just expensive, it's more expensive than everything else... combined.
That's what a new study done by California's state senate determined this week. Here are the very ugly numbers:

• The annual price tag for single payer health care in the Golden State would be a whopping $400 billion.
• The total amount of money allocated for the California state budget for the coming fiscal year is $179.5 billion
• TILT!

Okay, that "TILT!" part wasn't officially a mathematical or economic term. But you get the idea. Even with the $200 billion California currently gets from federal and other sources for its health costs, the state would still have to more than double its entire budget to cover the additional costs of providing universal health care.
The study tried to be a bit more optimistic, noting that private employers currently pay between $100 and $150 billion per year to provide health insurance for their workers and hypothesizing that money "could" be made available to the single payer plan. But that assumes those employers and employees would be okay with choosing a government-run option instead of their private insurance.
Yeah, none of that is going to work.
The good news is that this study wasn't conducted by some right wing or libertarian group, but the Democrat super majority controlled California state legislature. And that means the harsh realities of what it costs to provide this long-held dream of the liberal Democrats in America can finally start being debunked in favor of more workable options.
Let's stop here for a second and clarify something that's been lost in the eternally annoying debate about whether health care is a right or a privilege. The only human right connected to health care that isn't ruinous to all other rights and responsibilities is the right of an urgently injured or dying person to get emergency care, no questions initially asked.
Once that care is administered, the care givers and/or those who paid for the care have a right to ask for some kind of payment. This is a basic ethical truth that, thanks to the bean counters in Sacramento, now has even more economic truth to back it up.
Okay, let's get back to some other realities. We now have comprehensive proof that providing government paid health care would sacrifice all those other core rights that the left, right, and just about everyone in the middle believes in.
Let's start with K-12 and higher education, which California currently spends more than it does on health care according to the state's own itemized budget figures.
So we must ask: Is it worth it to sacrifice our children's education for single payer health care?
Then you'd have to do some serious cutting to the billions the state spends to protect natural resources and the environment. The right to live in a world free of the horrors of climate change is also a right a lot of people in the same Democratic Party keep telling us is the most important thing.
So we must ask: Is it worth it to sacrifice our environment for single payer health care?
And then there's the legal right to having... legal rights. Right now, California spends about $121 billion each year to keep the judicial system, police, and jails open and running.
So we must ask: Is it worth it to sacrifice our public safety for single payer health care?
Take your time to answer, but that's the thing about rights. It's great when we commit to providing and protecting a large number of them in theory. But what do you do when one right crowds out or even cancels out another?
The simple answer is that some of those rights need to be prioritized and even rationed. Unless of course, we stop talking so much about rights and more about responsibilities. And right now, the California government may want to take the responsibility for everyone's health care for the political power it will give the state, but it certainly cannot afford it.
And this report should also stop the incessant argument from the left that single payer somehow saves money. It certainly doesn't save the state money. And even if a state like California would make the outrageous decision to double its taxes and other fees to somehow cover the cost of single payer, that would cost the private sector billions of dollars in lost income and jobs.
Health care costs are always hard to control because of the constancy of demand. But instead of spreading the cost around and thinning it out, single payer concentrates it to the government to the detriment of everything else that government and society want to achieve.
It's understandable why so much of the public is afraid of a more free market health care system. Most Americans get a weak economic education as it is, and those who do often get one that's biased against the free market.
But now California has given the public solid reasons to really fear single payer because it's obvious how much we'd all have to sacrifice to get it. Those who want more government paid health care must now be forced to explain what other key rights and expenditures need to be sacrificed for that dream.
Meanwhile, free market advocates need to seize on this California news as well and explain how the private sector can provide care without bankrupting its customers.
No matter where the debate goes from there, at least now we're forced to stick to the real numbers. At least the government of California has adequately provided that.
Commentary by Jake Novak, CNBC.com senior columnist. Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.
For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.

It never ceases to amaze me at how they try and cherry pick instead of look at countries that are larger in scope and more comparable to the U.S. (i.e. the UK, Germany, France, Italy). I have no interest in paying between 50-70% in taxes for health care (seriously...WTF!). But in the Liberal mind, this makes perfect sense. I can't wait to move out of this god forsaken state. The fact that I lasted this long living among these idiots is a testimony to the patience I have.

 

[ShotgunPete]

It's this entitlement mentality that is destroying this country.Everybody wants something and expects it to be free!The ones that scream the loudest are the ones that pay no taxes.

 

[Willie99]

liberals are very consistent with one thing and one thing only, other people always have to pay for their mistakes

 

[SheriffJoe]

I can't help but scratch my head at the math skills of the moronic Liberals

I'm beyond the "head scratching" phase.

 

[JDeuce]

liberals are very consistent with one thing and one thing only, other people always have to pay for their mistakes

Sort of. IMO, it's more along the lines of them being very generous with other people's money.

Anyhow...if you aren't a member of the dimocrap cult, reading a headline like this should give you a serious moment of pause. As in, "wow...look at those fucking numbers. Now imagine what an impossible mess it would be to centrally manage health care on a federal level."

 

[GasMan]

Liberal losers.

 

[SheriffJoe]

CA single-payer bill passes out of committee … without any explanation of funding it

POSTED AT 4:41 PM ON MAY 26, 2017 BY ED MORRISSEY

The California state senate has passed a bill creating a single-payer health care system to the full legisature, only without an important component — any idea how to pay for it. An analysis by the chamber determined that such a system would cost more than twice the annual budget for the state, and even with a full guarantee of current federal funding, the shortfall would exceed the entire $180 billion budget for FY2018. Where will California get the money? Democrats apparently don’t care:

A California Senate committee tasked with reviewing bills that spend state money passed a $400 billion universal health care proposal Thursday with no funding plan.

Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, introduced SB 562, a sweeping overhaul of the state’s health insurance market. He’s also the chair of Senate Appropriations. The committee passed the bill with a 5-2 vote during a fast-paced suspense file hearing, clearing the way for it to be taken up on the Senate floor next week.
The vote came days after the committee revealed the Legislature’s first cost assessment of the bill, which turns out to be more than the entire state budget for the year beginning July 1.

Lara has yet to reveal a detailed plan about how the state would come up with the money to provide health care to the nearly 40 million people living in California. Opponents argued that the funding issue should have been addressed before the committee voted on the measure.

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Details, details! Who cares about how one pays for an entitlement program? The point is to pass it, and let your great-granchildren figure it out. In this case, however, the problem is so large that it’s impossible to do without the funding in place first, because of the need to pay providers for goods and services. California hardly has an extra $200 billion laying around, and even if it did, it would need to shore up its collapsing pension system first. The state is also on the hook for a $100 billion high-speed rail system whose funding is still unclear. Democrats don’t have much idea about how to pay for their current priorities, let alone their seizure of the health-care sector.

Why would Democrats put themselves at risk by passing such a massive seizure of a sector of the economy without planning for the funding and the costs? Because that’s what their progressive base urges them to do. Here’s RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, offering a foul-mouthed tirade that ridiculed those who are waiting for a fiscal analysis at a rally for SB562. DeMoro also called support for universal access “chicken-s*** talk for I’m never going to say ‘single payer health care’.” With arguments like this, who needs facts and data, eh (not safe for work)?

The reason why Democrats don’t have a funding plan for single payer is because all of the options would be political catastrophes, as I noted in my column for The Week. As Colorado voters discovered early enough to matter, the options would get even worse after implementation as costs escalated even further from revenues:

But wait! Can’t they just use the money California employers pay now for health care by transferring those funds to the state in taxes? Theoretically yes — but it’s still not enough. According to the Bee‘s report of the Senate analysis, “Employers currently spend between $100 billion to $150 billion per year, which could be available to help offset total costs. To get that cash into the California system, the state would have to impose new taxes to seize those funds — and even then, California’s new health-care system would still come up short by between $50 billion to $100 billion every year.” …

The solutions for this fiscal meltdown in a single-payer system, CHI noted, were all unpleasant. One option would be to cut benefits of the universal coverage, and hiking co-pays to provide disincentives for using health care. That would in some cases “reduce the level of insurance below what [Coloradans] have today,” the study noted. The state could raise taxes for the health-care system as deficits increased, which would amount to ironic premium hikes from a system designed to be a response to premium hikes from insurers. Another option: Reduce the payments provided to doctors, clinics, and hospitals for their services, which would almost certainly drive providers to either reduce their access or leave the state for greener pastures.

Those are the only options available in closed systems. Our experiences with other state-run single-payer systems in the U.S. only reinforce the conclusions reached by CHI. Medicare and Medicaid have attempted to restrict provider payments while expanding their enrollments, and as a result providers have greatly reduced their access to new patients from both systems. The Veterans Administration has wait times for its clinics that stretch out so long as to have resulted in patient deaths, along with rampant corruption to hide failures and protect the bureaucrats at the expense of the patients. The Indian Health Service, which provides care to those on reservations, has such crises of funding that Native Americans stuck in the system joke about not getting sick after June.

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That’s the reason why Lara and his allies want to pass this bill in a rush. They don’t want to account for the accounting, which will expose this as a massive and inefficient seizure of open markets that will require an avalanche of taxes, mandates, and rationing. “Don’t wait,” their allies urge while ridiculing fiscal responsibility. There’s a big, big lesson in DeMoro’s profane inanities, if Californians are willing to learn it.

http://hotair.com/archives/2017/05/26/ca-single-payer-bill-passes-committee-without-explanation-funding/

 

[SheriffJoe]

This is a perfect example why 'progressives' cannot be reasoned with. And a further example why "centrism" is just as foolhardy.

What is "centrism" when the radicals keep moving their party and country further and further left?