Senate Panel Kills Schwarzenegger Health Coverage Bill

[djs]

Schwarzenegger and Núñez maintained the plan would raise enough revenues to pay for itself through the employer and employee contributions, a fee on hospitals, an additional $1.75 tax on a pack of cigarettes and leveraging the money to increase matching federal funds.

I always thought the fee on hospitals part of this plan was a bit strange. Only in politics would this make sense. Lets see, how do we pay for health care? Oh, lets have the hospital pay for it! Now, where exactly do they get the money to pay for this? They raise the price of providing healthcare.

Of course, this would be idiotic if it was a zero sum gain, where you charge a fee to the hospital of $1, the price goes up a $1. It wouldn't, there would be overhead, administrative fees, and hospital markups. So for every $1 of a fee, the hospital would have to raise it charges by $1.50. This makes it beyond idiotic.

Dan

 

[retread]

I think a better plan would be to look around for some deep pockets... say an insurance company like UHC. Then poke around until you can uncover an item that could be a violation against one of their members. If this insurance company has, say, 133,000 members and you can levy a fine of $10,000 per member for this violation, why that would amount to $1.33 billion dollars!

Wait! Haven't they already done that?

 

[Mr. Bill]

I heard on CNN that there's one more somewhere up in Alaska, but that hasn't been confirmed

No, not Alaska.

Larry Kudlow and myself. The only ones left.