Mark Levin: We must filibuster Kagan!

Regardless of her own personal opinions, she has demonstrated a constant willingness to work alongside conservatives and clearly values diversity of opinion. I'll be honest, Republicans would be foolish to filibuster this one, because if they destroy her the next candidate is almost assuredly going to be much more liberal.

The problem with challenging the constitutionality of the personal mandate is that all it is is essentially a new tax that you can easily avoid having to pay for. Our system is set up by law so that if you go to the emergency room they legally must treat you, and if you can't pay for it the cost gets underwritten and very often borne by the taxpayers. The government has effectively decided that, since everyone participates in the healthcare system to some degree, everyone should have to pay for some portion thereof regardless of whether or not they have actually chosen to go out and buy health insurance – because, again, they can go to the emergency room, which is at its core a form of insurance. Should you have health insurance, however, you are actively paying for your share of maintaining the system, and so there is no intrinsic need for you to pay a tax to that effect.

And I would say maintaining a healthcare system speaks directly to the “General Welfare” of the States.

P.S. Man, Scoop, I write 1500 words about why Mark Levin is a vile little toad and I get no response? Disappointing…

Mark Levin is a damn idiot.

Who the hell does he want to be nominated? A conservative?

That's OBSCENE. Which one is gonna cost us taxpayers MORE? Maybe a million people using the emergency room without paying for it…OR….30 million people who are REQUIRED to have health insurance and CAN'T AFFORD THAT which requires WE THE TAXPAYER to pick up the slack? THAT'S where the “emergency room” argument falls flat.

Conservative or not, he's got a point about her sharing his “Constitution is a living and breathing document” ideology.

I think it's just gonna be downright brutal if we don't have a serious answer to that exact question though…whether or not she believes it's constitutional to require people to purchase a service.

Your argument falls flat in that we, the healthcare insurance holding taxpayer, don't have to pick up the slack anymore, because people now have to purchase their own insurance and insurance companies can't deny them. The alternate, again, would be to outlaw usage of the emergency room by anybody who doesn't have health insurance.

You're correct, though, in that it doesn't necessarily keep down costs because a lot of people who don't have health insurance don't have it because they can't afford it – and trying to use the muscle of the IRS to get it out of them won't necessarily change that fact, which is why we needed a public option in the first place. Look, I'm an ardent supporter of the free market in almost every case, but there are things for which it is ill-suited, and one of them is healthcare, for the simple fact that the healthcare insurance companies don't really offer a tangible service that justifies their need to take profits – that, and the fact that the free market is designed to favor the strongest among us without care for the weakest, which is not what I believe a healthcare system should do. And I know you complain about government bureaucracy but that sounds like the suspicious rumblings of someone who doesn't have to regularly put up with the bs that healthcare insurance companies throw to us.

Look, I live abroad (in Japan – I'm a translator and now a graduate student) and I prefer the U.S. in almost every respect except for one thing: health insurance. I can literally go to any hospital (and there are a lot) I want at any time for any reason and receive reasonable quality care, and, as a student my premium is 3,000 yen (about $35 these days) per month (Japanese doctors are woefully underpaid so this is going to go up in the near future, but I am okay with that). I also continue to hold a policy in the U.S. because I plan on eventually going back there permanently and I also take two prescriptions that haven't been approved for sale here yet. My policy is a cadillac policy, if you will, because both of my parents are doctors and my father is also a senior executive and CMO of one of the largest hospitals in the country. For discretion, I am not going to give names, but if you watch the news you've seen him before — I mention this only to say that I literally have the best possible plan money can buy.

So, the last time I went home, I began by notifying my insurance company three weeks ahead of time that I was going to be home and needed to see my doctor, get my prescription, and have it filled on a razor-thin time margin. The company, of course, forces me to mail in all of my prescriptions and have them filled out of state (because when you don't have any national regulations they do things like this – and make you wait several weeks to get a prescription filled, even for something like antidepressants, when the pharmacy down the street has them), but I tell them that I'm going to need an exception. After 45 minutes of hold and call-backs at international direct dial rates, I am told that everything is clear.

Three weeks later I get home and get my prescription, take it to the pharmacy and they tell me that the claim has been denied and I need to call my insurance company. I do this and am told there is no record of my exception being put on file and that they will call me back. Someone then calls me back and informs me that, in fact, my policy had been ineffective for over 16 months – this isn't true and I've received medical care coverage from them a number of times over the past 16 months – they tell me that someone will look into it and get back to me. I am then called – a day before I leave to go back to Japan – and told that I was right, and that I am still entitled to my coverage, but that they require all prescriptions to be filled by mail order. After calmly explaining that I had already made arrangements to have them filled in-state, they tell me that the person who has that authority has gone home and won't be back until Monday and that there's nothing they can do – I should just go ahead and fill it and they'll look into it and get back to me (but they can't call me internationally and I can't assign a proxy to handle the situation, of course, so I need to keep calling them). Fortunately I come from a situation where I can fill a $572 prescription (remember, this is half a year's supply of medication) on short notice and live life more or less unchanged – but that was last month and I'm still waiting for them to reimburse me for the cost. 6 months ago my sister in law had back surgery which was pre-approved and then told afterwards that it wasn't going to be covered because it was a “pre-existing condition” (which it wasn't). I believe her doctor just got reimbursed the $16,000 or so that they wanted her to pay.

And again, I say this only to put it in perspective: I come from a background where an expense of $572, or even $16,000, could be absorbed in an urgent case, but my parents also constitute a bracket that represents less than 1% of the US population. The goal of the health insurance companies is to pay out absolutely as little as possible – that's why they higher actuaries and underwriters – and maximize their profits, and I would have no moral qualms about that if the business that they dealt in wasn't people's lives. I don't think a federal system would be perfect and it would naturally have some waste and fraud, but honestly the way we do things is completely inexcusable. A single payer system is the ideal but, honestly, America is too big and has too many people – as well as a hospital system with class-based accommodations (which I'm not passing a value judgment on, I'm using it to bolster the argument against going single payer) – for that to be effective. I could envision a multi-tiered public system which allows you to pay a certain percentage of your income in exchange for certain fixed percentage co-pays on different types of procedures (in other words, the less you pay the higher your deductible), but even that's just sort of a pipe dream.

A public option, however, is a complete necessity, and let's face it, insurance companies oppose it because they know that without the profit motive the public sector would do a much better job – you want to talk about waste and inefficiencies? Why should my premium dollars go to paying for my insurance provider's advertisements? Why, for that matter, should the director of a healthcare insurance company be rich?

The free market is for people to offer products and compete for marketshare – those who offer good products will do well, those who offer poor products will do poorly. It's not great for the consumer in the sense that some people wind up with shoddy items, but it allows for the best items to come to the surface as well – and I can sleep well at night knowing that someone got screwed and bought a lame TV. Health insurance companies, however, don't provide a good or even a service except that they pool everyone's money together and then give it out when necessary to those who need it – which is a totally marxist business structure anyways when you really think about it – they don't come up with anything innovative for the simple fact that they're little more than middlemen, so I don't see what entitles them to the profits that they make by, again, proactively trying to prevent people from getting the healthcare they need, and I sleep less well at night knowing that people face medical bankruptcies.

To put it another way, the free market theory depends on two things:

1) All parties are rational actors
2) The self-interest of all parties involved in the transaction work a such that all parties benefit from the results.

With healthcare people aren't rational actors because they're being provided a need rather than a want. If my appendix bursts, I can't sit around and see how the market for appendixes develops or maybe decide to just learn how to take care of it myself – in other words, I don't have the luxury of thinking or acting rationally and rolling the dice with the results. Furthermore, it's in my self-interest to get my appendix taken out quickly and safely, but my health insurance provider, whose primary goal as a business is to deliver a profit to his shareholders, is best served by not paying for my appendectomy – and, although I'm on the individual market and could theoretically go elsewhere, the vast majority of people in this country get their insurance through their employer, which means that they have no choice in their provider.

Make it a public service, though, and you've got the self-interest of our officials — staying in office — and our self interest — getting money for healthcare when we need it — working in sync, and if we don't like the job they're doing we can vote them out of office or, in extreme cases, overthrow them. Will the government do a perfect job? Of course not, but they'll do a hell of a lot better one than what we have now.

We the taxpayer ARE the ones who have to pay for those who CAN'T AFFORD it. That's what the “National Exchange” is. It's the government providing their own insurance for all those millions of Americans who can't afford it FUNDED BY US. So…yeah. I think it WILL cost more for all those people to have insurance. We're not picking up the tab for emergency room visits anymore? There's still the fact that illegal immigrants use that service when they're injured as well, so….we'll still be paying for those using the emergency room AND now paying for those who can't afford their own policies.

It should absolutely be OUR CHOICE…PERIOD.

Last time I checked, insurance companies only take about a 3.5% profit rate so the argument of profits isn't really a valid one. I'm glad you brought up “Marxist business model” though.

The REASON why insurance companies operate the way they do is because it's NOT a free market system. It's so heavily regulated by government in the sense that a certain percent has to be used for this and a certain percent can be used for overhead. I believe as of now it's 65 disaster/35 overhead (including the outrageous profits) and starting next year it'll be 85/15. That's the government interfering with these companies. Also, the fact that you can't purchase across state lines is a government regulation/interference. There are only 5 players who I can get private insurance from in MY state. That's not very competitive at all. Going back to the 85/15 thing I just used, the government ALSO starting next year will FORCE insurance companies to write a check out for any unused portion of that 85% back to the consumer, so GOD FORBID that a lot of emergencies happen after they just paid them back and they have no emergency funds at the moment to cover the people. Next will come layoffs and/or “Sorry…we don't have the money to pay your claim.” I would much rather have to fight for my claim than for them not to have the money. The government's FORCING them to raise the premiums by doing all this to them just to cover their newly lowered percentage of overhead.

Plus, SOME states REQUIRE NONSENSE coverage such as chiropractic and cosmetic so they can't purchase a cheaper coverage plan without that crap on there. Government interference is the KEY reason why health insurance companies HAVE to charge so much and WHY insurance companies have to be “very careful” with WHO and WHAT they pay out of that disaster fund for. If they paid claims to JUST ANYONE, they wouldn't have any money left.

Yeah…it SUCKS that bureaucracy screwed you and your family, but that kind of stuff will only be WORSE with government-run healthcare in the end. Plus, there are hypochondriacs who will run up the costs of such a system as well with stupid things that they would normally just fix themselves because it's too expensive to WASTE the doc's time with right now.

For those people who get their insurance through employer, they CAN drop it and go elsewhere or just add another one if that's free through their employer.

My point in explaining how the current healthcare system is NOT free market is explaining to you exactly what would be AMPLIFIED if the government took over our system of healthcare fully.

I'm glad you at least acknowledge that Single Payer wouldn't work out for as many people as we've got. Vote them out or overthrow them, if we don't like the job they're doing running the public option system? I think I'd rather TAKE MY CHANCES with the CURRENT system than WAIT 4 YEARS or REVOLT.

Yes. I'm aware that Obama's example here isn't a violate of the first 10 Amendments, but that doesn't make it any less unconstitutional.

You're dodging the point that I'm making. The insurance focus is NOT the TRUE REASON why healthcare costs are so high therefore this bill is ABSURD.

You wanna make those prescriptions cheaper? GET RID OF THE FDA. Completely UNNECESSARY organization requiring YEARS of research and MILLIONS of dollars of grants and funds before allowing a medication to be prescribed. You wanna make those surgeries cheaper? ALLOW free market competition…perhaps get rid of the LICENSING system. Now, I know these sound like “bat$shit” ideas, but it's MY DECISION to make if I want a $1,000,000/year PHD or some guy who's unlicensed to do my surgeries. It's MY business if I wanna get a drug for CHEAPER that HASN'T been tested.

In a TRULY FREE society…these deregulations COULD WORK.

The government attempting to REGULATE and making everyone “SAFER” is what's TRULY led to the HIGH COSTS.

Since the bill is absurd for the reasons I described above…the MANDATE is EVEN MORE absurd.

http://www.FilibusterKagan.com is a new website that shows citizens how to persuade senators to filibuster Obama's Supreme Court nomination.