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Originally Posted by kronchev
then i dont favor complete "you **** up you dont get anything", i favor reduced payments. if I regularlly exercise and take care if myself, I should pay less, because ill be less of a burden to the system.
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If I excersise, eat grapenuts, fruits and berries, play with squirrels and other small furry woodland creatures, and practice yoga, I pay less into the system. If I smoke a lot, eat Mcnuggets for breakfast, and laze around all day staring at a cathode tube wasting away, then I pay more because I am a (potentially) higher cost to the system. Dude, you're describing the way
private health insurance works. The problem is a lack of money available for private insurance.
This and poverty are supposedely mitigated by the goverment payroll taxes of Social Security and Medicare. Social Security is 6.5% payroll, and Medicare is ~2.4% payroll. This adds up to around 9% of my (and your's as well) check. This is before state and federal income tax. But wait, there is more to it than that. Your employer matches your Social Security and Medicare taxes (nice way to hide it from the actual taxpayer, by having the employer "pay it in your name," hence the deduction doesn't appear on your check ...slimey). That doubles the contribution.
So for every $1000 of taxable income I see on my check, I and my employer shell out $200 for insurance on my behalf. If I make $50000 a year gross, that means I (and my employer) shelled out
$10000 for insurance crap "for my own good" of course. This is insurance that, if I'm thirty, I can't use for another thirty five years. Now, if I were to take that ten grand and split it 50/50 between health coverage and retirement savings myself, I would be able to get a very nice health insurance plan for my entire family, even if they had above average medical issues, (~$450 a month).
And if I was conservative about my investments, I could buy $5000 of thirty year Treasuries at a current yield of 5.5%. That means in thirty years I collect a $25000 dollar check. If I did that every year for ten years starting at age thirty until I was forty, that means I would earn a quarter of a million dollars between ages sixty to seventy. Thats half the income I was making when I was working. If I started at twenty, that means I would have piled on
another quarter million five years before I even retire. If I'm only making $25000 thou a year, then it would be half those values, just like Social Security.
Remember, this is with safe investments with extremely crappy returns, if want to risk it (which should be my choice, its MY money) for higher returns then it will be that much better (or worse). If I had place $1000 in a NYSE issue twenty years ago and it peformed as well as the NYSE over that time, it would be $25000 today for instance. Think Social Security is gonna give me those kinds of returns in either scenario? Nope. With Social Security the typical guy (who made PCI, which is about $45,000) retires at sixty five and gets a $1200 a month check from the gov, until he shoves off. Thats it.
Think Brians256, with all his current medical crises involving his wife and four kids, is finding any utility in all those Medicare payments? I guess he and his wife should have been sixty five years old before they had kids huh? Wake up kronchev, socialism completely blows, and its a ripoff.
phaestus, cheers fellow libertarian! It must be lonely thinking like that in Saskatchewan! Keep the faith!