Abdul emphasizes that your private health insurance goes bye-bye under Medicare For All

He's not "public option". He's Medicare For All.

Otherwise known as: Private Health Insurance For Nobody.

 

Joe Biden's national policy director for his 2020 campaign is pissed off a health care CEO gets $20 million a year while the nation's employees aren't taxed on their health insurance compensation, depriving the federal government of $500 billion a year

 That's the single largest tax loss expenditure on the list of tax loss expenditures.

Adding health insurance benefits for employees was a WWII era work-around to FDR's anti-capitalist wage controls, instituted to curb inflation.

When too many were unavailable to do the work because they were off fighting the war, the price of work sky-rocketed. Adding untaxed health insurance benefits helped employers attract and keep workers during wartime.

The untaxed health insurance benefit was & remains tax-free compensation, estimated as today's single largest tax loss expenditure at $500 billion/year.

But Biden's national policy director for his 2020 campaign goes off on a $20m CEO because high compensation earners are the easy target she only pretends are the problem instead of the one you see in the mirror every morning not paying taxes on everything you make.

She needs your votes for the public option, and isn't going to get them by telling you the truth.

The public option, to be sure, would have been superior to the Obamacare Rube Goldberg machine, and is clearly preferable to Medicare For All because the latter would end employer-provided health insurance.

But as with FDR it's still not capitalism, and if you push here something is going to pop out over there and become a problem. The iron laws of supply and demand will always assert themselves, but with capitalism the consequences are immediate, severe, and self-correcting by the market.

If you tax health insurance benefits, you will simply get less health insurance of the kind we have, accompanied by more cries for options from the marketplace for the health insurance we don't have, which if free to provide them . . . will.

Meanwhile a comprehensive federal income tax reform taxing all income at high rates above $102,230 for a single filer and $136,306 for married filing jointly as of June 2026, and at 0% below, is the place to start to reimagine fairness in the United States.

84% of individual earners made less than $100,000 in 2023. The vast majority of them would not notice that an average of $9,500 of employer provided health insurance was being counted as income under the new threshold of $102,230 because they would owe zero taxes anyway. 

We need more reality in economics and less fiddling with it, and certainly none of what Abdul is selling, which will require taxing everybody, not just the rich, much more. He is selling "free at the point of care", but nothing is free. Nothing.

 

 

Unaffordable Care Act to become more unaffordable for millions in 2026 due to Trump's reconciliation bill, just in time for the election

 

 Why 22 million people may see ‘sharp’ increase in health insurance premiums in 2026

... More than 22 million people — about 92% of ACA enrollees — received a federal subsidy this year that reduced their insurance premiums, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group.

Those recipients would see “sharp premium increase” on Jan. 1, Cynthia Cox, the group’s ACA program director, said during a webinar on Wednesday.

The average marketplace enrollee saved $705 in 2024 — a 44% reduction in premium costs — because of the enhanced tax credits, according to a November analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Without the credits, average out-of-pocket premiums in 2026 would rise by more than 75%, Larry Levitt, KFF’s executive vice president for health policy, said during the webinar.

Additionally, 4.2 million Americans would become uninsured over the next decade if the enhanced subsidies lapse, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That growth in the ranks of the uninsured is on top of the nearly 12 million people expected to lose health coverage from over $1 trillion in spending cuts Republicans made to health programs like Medicaid and the ACA to help offset the legislation’s cost. ... 

ACA enrollment has more than doubled, to roughly 24 million people in 2025 from about 11 million in 2020, according to data tracked by The Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF. ...  

According to Google's AI, there are 22.8 million fewer uninsured 2010-2024, presumably because of Obamacare, but 26.7 million more on . . . Medicaid!

Because of that Rube Goldberg Machine known as Obamacare!

Push here, and it comes out there. And the kicker is Medicaid involves estate recovery for nursing home and other care costs at death, which varies by state.

You can run, but you cannot hide. 

 

 

The Republican claim that the Big Beautiful Bill's cuts to Medicaid coverage will be offset by enrollments in employer-provided health insurance is a bad joke

The enrollment rate in employer provided health insurance is down four points 2008-2021, from 54% to 48%.

Why?

Costs.

The average premium for a health insurance plan from an employer was 36% higher in 2021 than the inflation adjusted premium from 2008 should have been. The 2008 premium of $4,386 should have been $5,446 in 2021. Instead it was $7,380.

People can't afford this insurance.

Meanwhile their out of pocket cost for it increased 86% over the period, while their deductibles shot up 131%.

Government mandated health insurance, Obamacare, has been a disaster for workers who have voted with their feet against it because they can't afford it and benefit little from it, swelling Medicaid enrollments in desperation.

Republicans promised to fix this in 2017 and failed.

Now they're saying, Let Them Eat Cake.

 

 

 

 

ABC's Jon Karl pretends that Kamala Harris wasn't for ending private health insurance and that she's changed her position despite zero evidence of that

 

Tim Walz is a conventional California lefty on immigration who rammed through his radical policies in Minnesota once Democrats got control of its legislature

Kamala Harris picked him because she went with her gut.

As the Democratic governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz signed into law initiatives allowing immigrants in the country illegally to apply for driver’s licenses, qualify for free tuition at state universities and enroll in the state’s free healthcare program for low-income residents. Walz’s actions on immigration—nearly all taken in the last two years, when Democrats had control of the state Legislature—put him squarely in the mainstream of his party. ...

Allowing those without a legal immigration status to drive legally, go to college at in-state rates and enroll in health insurance are pieces of a two-decade project by Democrats ...

“He’s more in line with what we’re seeing in states across the country led by a Democrat,” said Victoria Francis, deputy director of state and local initiatives at the American Immigration Council, a liberal-leaning national advocacy organization.

More.

The idiots at UK Daily Mail published editorial discussions about the article in the body of the article on John Deere shipping good American jobs to Mexico lol

 

XX Should we have the Dubuque job losses here too - bunch them all together, at least on first mention. And can we do them in chronological order - May is before March. Also assuming this first Oct one is 2023. And/or a little fact box on them, which we could also get made up ona  little graphic of Iowa showing Factory location and town, population, jobs lost (and jobs left). Might be good to summarise that way. But can do it a fact box first and then decide on map graphic.           

 

I'm sure the company would respond that the 2021 strike was the greed. 

There's plenty of greed to go around, though, obviously.

 

Fury as one of America's oldest companies slashes jobs in the Midwest as it shifts work to Mexico: 'It's greed'

The layoffs come after 10,000 unionized John Deere workers went on strike for five weeks in October 2021.

The strikes were among the most prominent during 'Striketober', where thousands of workers from Nabisco, Kellogg's, McDonald's and others walked out for weeks or even months to protest low pay in the wake soaring company profits.

Striking John Deere employees won a 10 percent raise for hourly earners, increased retirement benefits and the maintaining of the health insurance program that workers don't have to pay premiums for.

The dingbat who wrote this trainwreck of a story just got married and says she's looking forward to the big tax break from married filing jointly and being a dependent on her husband's health care plan lol

 Farewell -- and good riddance -- to 'typical American family'...

 When my partner and I file our annual income taxes in the coming weeks, we'll enjoy a sizable tax break thanks to our decision to tie the knot last fall. And as a dependent on his employer-provided health-insurance plan, I'm able to make a living as a freelancer without worrying about healthcare coverage.

As much as I sympathize with this guy's tale of Obamacare woe, his timeline is pure fantasy

 The story is here:

My insurance was $185/month with a $1,000 deductible. That was for a family of 5. So I voted for Obama-Biden in 2008 based on Obamacare. ...  the cheapest insurance I could find to replace that one was $1,200 a month with a $6,000 deductible.

The guy had a great plan before Obama!

But Obamacare as he now thinks he knows it didn't even exist in 2008 for him to base his vote on it.

Obama was for something else, the public option, a government-funded health insurance plan designed to compete with private health insurance. That was also Nancy Pelosi's preference, and the preference of the US House Democrat left at the time.

The great fear was the public option would crowd out private insurance and defeat it because it would be more attractive to women and the chronically ill.

The House public option plan put forward in 2009 competed with the Senate plan, and the two proposals were at an impasse by the end of 2009. Eventually the Senate version prevailed in March of 2010.

The Senate plan was actually worse, what we now call Obamacare.

It dictated the much more expensive nature and new shape of all existing private insurance plans instead of providing a separate public option to compete with those already existing private insurance plans. It cost more to provide because it eliminated pre-existing condition exclusions, and treated men and women equally even though women's care is more costly.

It was fascism pure and simple, government dictating to the private sector what will be, and what will not be.

That's how you lost your old plan, your old doctor, and your money: Because Obama bowed to the Senate plan, instead of fighting for what he said he believed in.

If you were too poor, though, to qualify for Obamacare, you just got stuck with Medicaid, health insurance for the poor, and, failing that, with nothing at all.

The once heralded public option for everyone defaulted to Medicaid. Nearly 86 million are now stuck with that, and most are unaware of its clawback provisions.

Today only 21 million can afford Obamacare, and about 25 million non-elderly adults have bupkis, like the poor fella in the story had for ten years.

Meanwhile, 158 million have employer-provided health insurance, the cost of which climbs relentlessly. The average worker had to pay $549 a month in premiums for it in 2023.

Medicare provides coverage to about 66 million aged 65+, and costs nearly $175 a month in 2024.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

 

 

It's going to be fun to watch all the lemmings sign consent forms for "mandated" vaccines and COVID-19 tests

This is the Obamacare mandate travesty all over again. Once you sign the consent form, you can't say you were forced even though you were.

When you buy health insurance, you enter into a contract, but if you are forced into such a contract by a government mandate, it is no contract. It is invalid. You did not enter into it freely. That's the ancient understanding.

 

But that you did enter into the contract, albeit under duress, means it is too late. Your signature is on the document.

No one has successfully tried the traditional definition of contract before the Supreme Court to invalidate the Obamacare mandate. The court does not respect the old understanding of contract.

I doubt these mandates will be stopped either.

You do not live in a free country.

And the Ann Coulters and redsteezes of the world see no problem with that.

Resistance may cost you something much more significant than a few bucks on your tax return this time.

That Obama guy did an outstanding job of screwing up health insurance, and raising the price of hamburger, and Biden isn't far behind him

 

Hamburger in this data series averages $4.04/lb in March 2021.

Mayor Buttplug doesn't care if private health insurance companies serving 150 million Americans fail

Trade wars started in 2018 instead of 2017 by default, the same reason immigration wars started after he lost the House

Trump never had a strategy for getting what he ran on, but the GOP had a strategy for getting what it wanted.

Trump should have leveraged this situation to his advantage. You give me my immigration checklist, my trade checklist, I'll give you corporate tax reform and defense spending. Instead, the phony Art of the Deal author caved and gave them everything without getting anything.

Trump wasted the first entire year on repealing and replacing Obamacare, the latter being the fool's errand Trump in his hubris added after securing the nomination. Did he not pay attention to the clash between Democrats in 2009 over the House healthcare plan vs. the Senate plan? It took a Herculean effort to get a compromise, all without Republican input. Like he could get Republicans united for something similar, after ripping them all to shreds in 2016.

Total doofus, surrounded by doofi.

The only thing he's getting right is that he doesn't need anybody to conduct the trade war. Doesn't really matter when he conducts it, but Republicans would have been begging him to end it much earlier if he had started it much earlier. And that is the definition of the art of the deal.

Too bad he didn't think of it.

y/y change US imports of goods from China: Sum Ting Wong long before this

Elizabeth Warren wants to cancel your health insurance culture AND your income tax culture and replace them with socialism

[T]his time, a wholesale government takeover of health insurance would actually be a step toward socialism, which is still viewed more negatively than positively by Americans overall. “You don’t win with a message of socialism in a swing state like Florida,” said Bill Nelson, a former Florida senator and Biden surrogate.

More here.

Elizabeth Warren's ridiculous health care calculator has no box to check for 24 million Americans who privately buy their own health insurance off-Obamacare Marketplace and not through an employer

The trend for growth of part-time work since 1968 has been much stronger than for full-time, saving business the cost of paying benefits such as paid holidays, sick time, retirement and health insurance

PART-TIME

FULL-TIME

Note the huge jumps in the percentage working part-time due to the Clinton tax increases after his election in 1992 and after the Great Recession in 2008.

Full-time has still not recovered to the two decade experience pre-Great Recession.

Unaffordable No Health Care Act: Health insurance premium increases pre-Obamacare 10%, post-Obamacare 60%

Yes, It Was The 'Affordable' Care Act That Increased Premiums:

It turns out that across the board, for all ages and family sizes, for HMO, PPO, and POS plans, premium increases averaged about 60 percent from 2013, the last year before ACA reforms took effect, to 2017. In same length of time preceding that, all groups experienced premium increases of less than 10 percent, and most age groups actually experienced premium decreases, on average.

Treasury bonds are the most expensive they have been in over sixty years

All "asset" classes are near-record expensive: bonds, stocks, gold, housing, college education, health insurance policies . . .. 

Cliff Asness, here:

So, the bottom line is, as measured by real bond yield, U.S. Treasury bonds are really frickin’ expensive. Measured by the slope of the yield curve they are really frickin’ expensive. But, measured by the average of these two simple variables, they are 60+ year just about record-low frickin’ expensive. This result is not caused by, but is certainly exacerbated by, the (perhaps) surprisingly uncorrelated nature of slope and real bond yield, thus making both so low and at the same time considerably more surprising.

Rush Limbaugh gets more out of touch with every passing day: "People like their health care from their employer"

Talk about delusional.

In my household we haven't had employer provided health insurance since 2008, but recently a new employer offered us some. My jaw hit the floor when I saw the price: $2,033 per month for family coverage.

Currently I pay $532 a month for family coverage, because I have a plan grandfathered in from pre-2010, which I get to keep as long as I don't make any changes to it. The new employer's plan is almost FOUR TIMES more expensive than what I'm paying now.

Compared to what I'm being offered by an employer right now my current plan looks mahvelous, right?

Well guess what it cost just eight years ago?

$227 a month.

That's right. Despite the fact I'm not hostage to Obamacare or employer provided insurance, my premiums have still risen 134% in eight years. And it would be even worse had I not raised the deductible. Needless to say, my coverage is nearly useless for office visits and routine tests; that's all 100% out of pocket, too.

But look at the scale of what's happened. The coverage I had in 2011 now costs me about two and half times as much as it did then, but this new employer plan costs NINE TIMES as much as privately purchased coverage cost me eight years ago.

That is insane.

OBAMACARE IS A CURSE AND A BLIGHT ON THE NATION, WHETHER YOU HAVE IT OR NOT, and Rush Limbaugh is as out of his mind as the Democrat hucksters trying to sell us Medicare for All or some other bottle of government elixir when he says people like their health care from their employer. They do not. The LA Times in May:

Health insurance deductibles soar, leaving Americans with unaffordable bills:

The 2010 healthcare law — often called Obamacare — provided landmark protections to Americans once shut out of health coverage. But as Democrats and Republicans fought over the law, Altman said, neither focused on the rapid run-up in costs for people covered through work. ... Over the same time, insurance premiums also increased, rising at more than double the rate of inflation and outpacing wage gains.

Obama stole neo-liberal healthcare mandate from Hillary, who stole it from "conservative" Heritage Foundation

There is no difference between forcing you to buy health insurance and taking your money to pay for Medicaid and Medicare.

Everyone is for tyranny.