please explain the Tea Party to a canuck

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The health care mandate is the price for keeping the private insurance racket in the game. The insurance racket says, "We have to ban people with pre-existing conditions and knock people off the rolls because otherwise healthy people will not buy insurance and when they're sick they will and the preexisting condition clause will force us to take him or her - they'll pay premiums only when they're sick while we're paying out more but never paying when they're healthy". Obama wanted to stop the practice of shutting out those with preexisting conditions from the insurance, so the only answer is to make the healthy buy insurance also.

Now, the ideal is for government to run the health insurance and that there be no premiums, instead it is funded through tax revenues. Obama however felt he could not cut out the insurance racket. If he had, then they would have been arrayed against him at the outset. Obama wanted to keep as many of these powerful players onside (Big Pharma, the insurance racket...) to more easily pass the bill. They could have told Big Pharma to lower their price for drugs, to use the government to that end, but they refused in fear of them.

The health care bill is an ugly compromise - and it is so because of Rahm Emanuel, the Blue Dogs and corporate money... not to mention Lieberman.

There are many who object to making people pay a for-profit company for insurance and this is where the public option comes in. With the public option, the health care bill had a significant majority support, but when Lieberman successfully got them to drop it, and then drop the Medicare buy-in (done to spite the liberals, Lieberman admitted), support for the bill plummeted. It was seen as giving everything the vested interests wanted.

The reason US health care is so expensive is that there are so many hands in the cookie jar making profits off of it - the insurance, the big pharma, the hospitals and so forth. The way to save money is to cut the profits out as much as possible, but these profits are used as weapons to bribe candidates to maintain the profits and the privilege and of course keep the health care system expensive. A real fixing of the system must involve confronting these powerful forces and unfortunately Obama seems not cut out for confrontation at all.

The reason health care is so expensive is because is primarily because there is third-party payment for everything (HMOs pay the bill, so consumers don't care what it costs). Why should insurance pay for routine operations? That's not insurance. Your auto insurance doesn't pay for oil changes. Insurance is for things that probably won't happen.

Government created expensive health care with the tax exemption of employer provided health care.

Routine Operations?! Even if routine operations were commonplace, which they're not, an operation is about 1000 times more expesinsive than an oil change, assuming no complications and a fairly simple surgery with a short recovery period. Should we really expect Americans to simply absorb a 25, 50, 100k, or more expendature?

The whole point of insurance is to cover potential expenses, whether they are likely to occur or not. .

Growing your food is not actually realistic, to both people who suggested that. This is not the 1800s.

Routine Operations?! Even if routine operations were commonplace, which they're not, an operation is about 1000 times more expesinsive than an oil change, assuming no complications and a fairly simple surgery with a short recovery period. Should we really expect Americans to simply absorb a 25, 50, 100k, or more expendature?

I'm talking about things we all go to the doctor for multiple times in our lives. Regular checkups, ER visits, dentist visits, etc. When you know for sure that something is going to happen, that's not what insurance is for. You still have to pay for it, in addition to paying your HMO's administration costs and profits.

Rebuilding a burnt down home is also expensive. But fire insurance is provided by private firms. The expense of the casualty is not sufficient reason to make it a government run enterprise.

ruveyn

Fire insurance is mandated by the bank in order to obtain a mortgage. I'm not quite sure what my point is here, but I had one when I thought of it.

Anyway, a house is not a human being. If an uninsured person cannot afford to rebuild their home, then they might be in financial ruin. If an uninsured person cannot afford to pay for needed surgery, then they might die. There is a significant difference.

Even so, check-ups are expensive, especially for babies who need them quite frequently and receive a multitude of tests and shots that add up to a small fortune pretty quick. It would be a pretty extremist view to eliminate well visits from insurance coverage. Not even republicans would agree with that idea. This sort of care is preventative and essential to avoid major illness and associated expenses.

ER visits, again, are not routine, and dental insurance is completely separate from medical insurance and a rarity to even have at all these days, like vision coverage.

I completely agree that removing profit from the system is a good idea.

Growing your food is not actually realistic, to both people who suggested that. This is not the 1800s.

And for some people, it is possible to get by without a car. I bike instead of driving, but that's not a realistic option for people in many parts of the country (or for anyone physically unable to bike long distances).

Regardless of what you say about it being possible, in principle, to avoid taxes on food, or the mandate to buy auto insurance, that is immaterial because in practice you have no way to avoid all taxes and government fees. I agree that the individual mandate is a bad idea, at least with the current structure of the healthcare reform, but I don't agree with the claims made against its legality by trying to set it apart from other legal mandates.

But you do realize that the price of those check-ups are included in the price of the insurance, right? You still pay either way, the difference is with first-party payment health care providers would have more competitive pricing.

The point is that when you buy something you are participating in commerce, and the growing own food is realistic for some people.

However, here is the key difference in the situation. All of the example you have given to justify the Mandate is engaging in commerce.

The problem with the health care bill is that it penalizes someone from not engaging in commerce. Short of committing suicide, you are being forced to buy a product just for being alive. That is tyranny, I seriously am expecting (unless a Supreme Court member dies suddenly), that the mandate will be ruled unconstitutional. If that happens the entire law is thrown out because Dems forgot the severability clause which would have allowed the court to simply rule parts of the law unconstitutional.

and the growing own food is realistic for some people.

The problem with the health care bill is that it penalizes someone from not engaging in commerce. Short of committing suicide, you are being forced to buy a product just for being alive. That is tyranny, I seriously am expecting (unless a Supreme Court member dies suddenly), that the mandate will be ruled unconstitutional. If that happens the entire law is thrown out because Dems forgot the severability clause which would have allowed the court to simply rule parts of the law unconstitutional.

Plenty of people compared Bush to Hitler and the rise of Nazi Germany, going so far to call 9/11 a false flag like the Reichstag fire during his term... I didn't consider it a fair comparison then, nor do I consider it a fair comparison to Obama today. It's just childish name calling and false connections.

So another argument for why healthcare should not be a part of commerce?

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The act not buying health insurance is choosing not to participate in commerce. The act of buying food is choosing to engage in commerce. The act of buying a car is choosing to engage in commerce. You can't legislate someone has to do something using the commerce clause when that person isn't engaging in commerce.