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Thursday, January 21, 2010

Health care, schmealth care

People a lot smarter than me could lay out a detailed and workable plan for successfully overhauling the nation's health care system. But who do we leave it up to? Congress? What qualifies them?

From what I've heard, President Obama's stated goal is to make health care both more available and more affordable.

More available means more people will be covered by private insurers - since the public option is off the table. And to make sure more people are covered by private insurers, it's going to be illegal not to have health insurance.

And I'm not sure how they plan on making it more affordable, although, Obama has said that by passing health care reform legislation, the budget deficit will decrease over the next ten years.

How's that again?


Will Obama pull one of these?

I have an idea. Why don't we move to a flat tax system?

Tax everyone in America - and I mean everyone - making more than $30,000 per year at a flat 10% rate. Do away with that ridiculous, bloated IRS Ponzi scheme.

What is that you're saying? What about all the unemployed accountants? We take some of the TARP money and cross-train them into skillsets that are viable in the 21st century: clean energy, nursing, etc. And we will need a ton of administrative help to monitor the new health care reforms, I'm sure.

I don't have time to parse all the labor statistics, but using round numbers, if there are a total of 200,000,000 workers in the US, and the median income is $30,000, at 10% that means a rough income tax revenue of $600 Billion for the treasury. That's not bad is it? And frankly, it would probably be more than that.

Although the U.S. National Debt Clock shows us over $12 Trillion in the hole, I'm thinking we could whittle that down pretty quick between $600 Billion in income tax revenue and annual sales tax revenue.

I don't know - what do you think?

X

2 comments:

  1. Like a lot of things, it sounded great when we first heard about it. Then there were problems and Congress got involved -- and like you said, what qualifies them -- then the press started reporting secret deals and all kinds of misinformation is being circulated from who knows what sources ...

    Is this whole health care reform thing turning into another big mess? Every time I hear about it now it just makes my head spin.

    Your plan just might work! So where do you submit a proposal?

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  2. I think we can submit plans at the ballot booth ;-)

    X

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