Why Have Medical Insurance?

Yes, exactly. Companies make more money with less tax and the rich get richer (because they own the companies) while the rest of us have to pay a larger share of taxes. Worse, these tax cuts will result in a larger deficit and an ever growing debt, something no one seems to be able to fix. Clinton at least lucked into a very balanced time when the economy was doing well and he did nothing to muck it up and helped to keep it going.

Exactly. Instead of dealing with the issues of expensive health care you seem to want to fight that by squeezing others ability to pay for it. If you think health care is too expensive then address that rather than taking away others' health care.

"Dumping money" is what you call providing health care? That's a pretty twisted viewpoint.

We don't especially. But denying others health care isn't the solution.

No response? How about we just make health care a universal right? Just like roads, defense and all the other things government does for all of us as a whole, why not make health care universal for all? Don't complain about the cost. We already pay for most to have good health care. We just need to add the remainder. It's one of those things that is hard to argue against. If you say the cost is too great, that means we have far too many people without medical care! If that is the case, what would be your solution?

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Rick C

Here's the actual 2015 data, from

(crunched from

(view in Courier, or other fixed font)

(amounts are in thousands of dollars)

cumulative cumulative cumulative AGI Returns % of returns Tax paid % of tax paid

0-$14,999 9,327,631 9.0% $ 4,636,632 0.30% $15k-30k 26,051,972 25.1% $ 22,399,084 1.78% $30k-50k 46,870,006 45.2% $ 63,951,368 5.98% $50k-100k 78,467,065 75.6% $219,848,592 20.44% 100k-200k 96,994,821 93.5% $332,328,734 42.29% 200-250k 99,412,894 95.8% $ 92,468,982 48.37%

Totals 103,773,537 $1,520,922,682

Half of total collections come from the top 4%. The bottom 45% /of tax-filers/ pony up about 6%.

(Note that there three times as many Americans as tax returns filed.)

Cheers, James Arthur

It's not subsidizing the rich. Anyone who engages in that activity gets the same rate, which is only fair.

Which tax rate do you think is lower for Buffett, than his secretary?

It's not true. But it's apparently over your head.

You're misrepresenting.

Buffett pays the same rate on wages as his secretary, and the same rate on capital gains as she does.

Cheers, James Arthur

I don't see a column for tax rates.

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Rick C

Wrong. If the "rich" take more in wages as a result, their share of income tax goes UP.

Wrong. It results in more money being taxed at the personal income rate, the highest tax rate.

You're being rather thick.

If someone is charging $5 for bananas, your solution is to take $5 from someone else to pay the man $5 for a banana. But that doesn't give the banana man any reason to lower his price--he'll raise it more.

You're hopeless.

That's your solution, not mine.

It is NOT a right. You CANNOT have a right to anything that someone else has to provide to you. You DO NOT own them, and DO NOT have a right to force them to provide you with things.

I already explained how to cut the cost in half without taking anyone's life, liberty, or property. That would go a long ways toward making health care affordable (and for more people. Your ideas do the opposite.

Cheers, James Arthur

Feel free to calculate it yourself. I already looked up the data, crunched it some, and gave you the links. Go ahead, pitch in. You'll feel good about it.

Cheers, James Arthur

Correct. The "late enrollment penalty" adds 30% to your premiums, for one year.

Cheers, James Arthur

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Ask anybody who pays capital gains tax. People who see income retained, re- invested and turned into capital gains, may differ.

Except that the rich seem to have a lot of money to spend on lobbyists, and the consequences of that are manifestly unfair.

same

Your interpretation of the word "rate" is open to discussion. Buffett clear ly meant it in the sense of "proportion of the money coming in". You've cho sen to interpret the word "rate" as having multiple meanings, different for each of the income streams involved. If Buffett had gone to trouble of spe lling out the - different - composition of his income and his secretary's i ncome when he made the statement - this might be a defensible reading, but in context, it isn't.

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He gets more control of way his money is spent if he gives it to charity. " Doing more good for society" is a rather broad motivation, and he probably had something more specific in mind.

The misrepresentation is all yours.

n

But that wasn't what Buffett was saying, nor what he was complaining about. You want to evade the point he was making, and so it's you who is going in for misrepresentation. Not for the first time.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Wednesday, May 10, 2017 at 6:49:57 PM UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote: ...

me

Not necessarily - at the higher income levels there is more opportunity to do income deferral and other techniques to avoid it being taxed as ordinary income. Many companies around here offer those programs to employees - I have only been able to take advantage once.

kevin

You have to define "rich" rather more tightly before you can claim that.

As Mitt Romney pointed out, about half the population pay no income tax at all, so the rich who do pay income tax pay infinitely more than the poor who don't.

It's a fairly broad-brush division between rich and poor, but at least it makes it easy to work out who belong on which category.

does pick out the top 1% of the income distribution, who do pay a respectable amount of tax, but balks at looking at the top 0.1% where tax avoidance gets more profitable (and popular).

The US system costs half-again more per head than European schemes that deliver much the same quality of care to everybody that only the fully insured enjoy in the US.

The US has clearly found a way of pushing up the costs of care, and chooses not to adopt schemes that other people have shown to work better.

The root of the problem is clearly the amount of money the US health insurers extract from the US insured, and US legislators seem totally unwilling to even try to moderate their rapacity.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Or postpone the procedure until the next enrollment period. Too bad you can't postpone a car accident or house fire.

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Rickman said specifically "because they own the companies" with the implica tion that the rich were going to enjoy capital gains, rather than higher wa ges. This is what this branch of the thread is about, so you are being disi ngenuous (as usual).

Only if the people who own the companies take the extra money in dividends

- which would be stupid, because then they would be taxed at the highest ra te. Tax avoidance is perfectly legal, but tends to be expensive, so only th e people with the highest incomes find it worth their while to go in for it on a large scale.

my*

That's the situation that US health care does seem to have set up, so that US health care cost half-again more per head than it does in places like Fr ance, Germany and the Netherlands.

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The Netherlands, with a bunch of closely regulated medical insurers paying for health care, seems to have set up a situation where the insurers have p ressured the hospitals to compete on price per procedure. The fact that the US system hasn't delivered this kind of result is clear evidence that the US system is badly designed and delivers inadequate performance.

.

Your solution did seem to involve dismantling Obamacare, and removing medic al insurance from the 20 million patients that it had covered for the first time.

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It works for every other advanced industrial country.

The way infectious diseases work, it makes sense to offer universal health care. Paying for it is a bitch, but coping with consequences of a plague pr esents equally difficult problems ( and you have to do it while grieving fo r the friends and relatives who didn't survive).

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I can't say I've ever noticed you posting any such explanation.

You routinely reject "socialised" medicine, which delivers US standard heal th care to everybody living in the other advanced industrial countries for two thirds of the price per head (or less).

James Arthur seems to think that his boiler-plate right-wing rhetoric spell s out the details of a health care system that would work. That's what brai n-washing does to you.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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They do much more than that. They negotiate huge blanket purchase agreement s with providers of goods and services within their preferred provider netw orks. The bigger insurers can get the cost down to next to nothing, paying off those phony medical services charges with ten cents on the dollar in ma ny cases. They nearly do as well with pharmaceuticals but not quite, since some pharmaceuticals have such a captive market, they don't need the volume a big insurer brings and won't enter an agreement. And I'm talking policie s with zero deductibles and very nominal copays. They also handle the inter face with providers' billing departments which are generally a super incomp etently managed *shit-show* employing morons. The retail pharmacies have tu rned into welfare employment for the dumbest riffraff to be found anywhere, there are some good employees but the number is of no statistical signific ance.

s - which would be stupid, because then they would be taxed at the highest rate. Tax avoidance is perfectly legal, but tends to be expensive, so only the people with the highest incomes find it worth their while to go in for it on a large scale.

I assume you are posting about some country other than the U.S.

In the U.S. dividends are taxed at a low rate. So taking the extra money in the form of dividends is smart

And there are many ways in the U.S. to avoid taxes which are not expensive. So most U.S. taxpayers use some of the ways to avoid taxes. Dan

On Thursday, May 11, 2017 at 7:16:24 PM UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@krl.org wrote: ..

...

Dividends or long-term capital gains can trigger AMT that will result in an effective tax rate of 26% or 28%.

At higher income levels AMT will already have been triggered so the effective rate for Dividends/capital gains becomes 20%.

kevin

nds - which would be stupid, because then they would be taxed at the highes t rate. Tax avoidance is perfectly legal, but tends to be expensive, so onl y the people with the highest incomes find it worth their while to go in fo r it on a large scale.

y in the form of dividends is smart.

They might be taxed at a low rate at source, but if the tax inspector sees them as income, they get taxed at the income tax rate, which does seem to b e higher than the rate on capital gains.

Your opinion about what might be "smart" is a bout as reliable as your opin ion that you are "smart".

e. So most U.S. taxpayers use some of the ways to avoid taxes.

There are certainly cheap ways of avoiding some taxes which almost everybod y does use.

The top 0.1% of the US income distribution does seem to have access to more expensive and more effective schemes.

Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" had an interesting section on the r ate of return achieved by various US college endowment funds, and the very rich ones did quite a bit better than the rest.

It's on page 316

The three colleges with more than $10 billion make 10.2% per year, those wi th over $1 billion make 8.8%, and those with less than $100 million made 6.

2%.

This isn't tax avoidance, but does point to economies of scale.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

I have health insurance for two reasons.

1. It protects my life savings from a 0,000 hospital bill.
2. The insurance company negotiates the fees charged.

I'm already charged more, up from $4,512 in 09 to $11,232 today, because I was charged for other people getting sick.

Mikek

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I can't believe you would write that last part after writing the first part. How can you expect to be protected from a $300,000 hospital bill if you don't want to pay for *others'* hospital bills? They are the ones who will pay for *your* bill if/when it comes.

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Rick C

Good grief, you _are_ as stupid as shortrex!