zbbrox wrote:
I'm sorry, but I think this is deeply wrong. First of all, nobody is suggesting that small business owners should be made to suffer. The question is why someone would make a fervent plea for help on behalf of people who can, in fact, help themselves when only weeks ago millions of people who don't have the same resources were in much more direct trouble.
It's also ridiculous to suggest that helping the poor causes some kind of brain drain -- in reality it's exactly the opposite. A society where we help the poor is a society where, A: more intelligent and hard-working people find opportunity, B: it is much more pleasant to live because you don't have deprivation lining the streets, and C: even those people craven and callous enough that they're abandon their country because of the expectation that they help others will find that a strong working class presents a vastly better market for their services than an impoverished nation does
I'm not saying anyone said small business owners should be made to suffer. I am saying that despite good intentions, there are issues with the current US healthcare system that hurt both the working class and the lower middle class. I'm not talking about the higher middle class or the rich, they are fine.
Small businesses are made to cover a worker's health insurance if they are full-time workers. This is not chump change, this could be a significant amount per worker. For big businesses this is affordable but for a small business it cuts into things. As a result a common practice is that they will keep multiple part time workers and many working class citizens are working 2-3 part time jobs instead of one steady full time job. Even big businesses that CAN handle it do this practice but that is another thing.
Also I am not saying anyone is starving. That was part of my analogy not meant to be taken literally.
However I do think the situation might be quite severe for a number of people. A lower middle class family of 4 paying 1600 for health insurance alone per month is ridiculous but it is happening and I know people who have suddenly had this drop on them this year. That may be similar to the situation Zach and friends are asking for help on.
Yeah we want the poor to have all the opportunity they can get, and they have it, again I want to reiterate the free education, job opportunities, free access to knowledge infinitely growing.
Health insurance is a different beast though. Imagine going to the doctor and doing a check up for 15 dollars. Your health insurance that you pay for covers it and you are good to go. Now imagine "free" health insurance paid for by the state. You go to get the same check up, you pay nothing, the "free" insurance covers it and decides to bill the state 30 dollars instead of the 15. Another person not getting the the check up then ends up paying for the whole thing through increased health insurance premiums. They keep getting away with it until they bill 40, 50, 60, etc. until we get the situation that we are at today.
I am not saying that a "brain drain" would happen instantly but yeah if this continues over the next decade, or the next generation, it could change things. Our country may be free but remember that the whole world competes with each other economically. It's not unheard of for an american today to move to another country for work. It could be to pay for a child's future education, or an individual wanting a better life. It could be for job skills, for example there are places in China, Japan, South Korea, where teachers are paid a lot higher than they are here. Don't let that become the trend for other careers or businesses.
Don't let the rhetoric of helping the poor be the excuse anymore.
The result is that, what? we help the poor, so long as they don't work/ barely draw in enough income to support themselves, and if they get a little bit better they hit a ceiling where they are worse off than when they had no income but free health insurance, food stamps, unemployment insurance? An intelligent person is going to get up there and break out no matter what, I agree. But there are people who are going to be incentivized by such a system to just be lazy and rely on the system and they are more numerous than it is comfortable to admit. If the incentive is to increase that group of people that will happen, and someone has to keep paying for them. Nothing is really free. Every dollar is a portion of somebody's hard work.
But we can be charitable, and we can decide to give up a portion of our hard work to be charitable. Let that be your focus instead of forcing people through the state system.
Also when you give millions of people health insurance, but there are not enough doctors or hospitals, the result is those people may still miss out on actual health care. A huge portion of that health insurance fund is instead going into a bureaucratic system of medical billing, a whole mess of trying to figure out who to charge, and a portion of that goes into the corrupt charge master system I described above which is contributing to the higher rates in the first place.