And hey... You're in good company as a newly minted "unreasonable member of the left-wing fringe". ;)

I do appreciate the thoughtful response. In the area of providing specifics (highlighted against the particulars of the bill) you haven't demonstrated the actual subsidy an individual would be getting to offset the cost of premium that could be compared to the individual tax that a mandated person would be required to pay if their budget is unable to accomplish what the government has determined should be feasible. So in that respect, I don't think you have actually accomplished what you purport to have done. This is, after all about individual mandates, not the employer mandates - who pretty much knocked their responsibility portion out of the Baucus bill.

I strongly disagree with the correctness of your belief that a hypothetical potential loss, not directly borne by any individual (uninsured hit by a bus) justifies a coercive penalty borne by a specific individual. Indeed, the person who may be non-compliant ultimately bears an equivalent portion of any burden that my be incurred by providing them catastrophic care. I further believe that as implemented, using taxation to force every individual in the nation to enter into a contract with a private corporation is unprecedented. This is NOT something we do all the time.

You might as well say keep your government hands off my health care and why should I have to pay for all those lazy people who don't buy their own insurance.

And if I do get hit by a bus - the penalties I've paid really don't have any bearing on the fact that it's still the ER plan being used (at least under the HELP version) because the money was spent on premiums and not saved for my own catastrophic care - you STILL end up paying for my care regardless. I'm pretty sure these funds aren't fungible and will be allocated with the budget calculated assuming penalty income as a source of funding. It seems more like cities who end up being able to increase their budget by writing speeding tickets.

If the point is to get people covered, wouldn't it make more sense to put the penalty into pre-paying a policy for the person being penalized? With the way it's written, a person is taxed - $3000 or up to the cost of a policy as a one time hit. They are forced to "chip in" but still have nothing for themselves and less resources to purchase coverage in the following year. This seems likely to produce a cycle where someone who runs afoul of the penalty based on true inability to pay is likely to simply find themselves in a higher tax bracket and still have no coverage. And their income is still calculated by the government as if the penalty had not even occurred (ie $33,000 income - $3000 penalty = $30,000 available to the individual, but for all calculation purposes they are still viewed as having taken $33,000 into their pocket).

Your formulation seems to only envision people with plenty of money in their pocket refusing to buy insurance as an attempt to game the system: the "obstinate". I propose to you that there will be people who simply can't budget what the government believes is reasonable. Which is another aspect of this that bothers me. The government is literally opening the books of the citizens and making budgeting priorities based on generalities that may or may not accurately represent a citizen's actual life.

Your assertions about the insurance companies firing half their people seems to indicate a lack of understanding about the way an insurance company actually works. Every claim will still be handled by an adjuster. Nothing about this legislation changes that. In fact, by dumping millions of people into the system there is going to be a massive increase in the need for those who oversee the process. Additionally, there is the new requirement for annual filings an behalf of every insured individual placed on the insurance company. This requirement exists exclusively to service the individual mandate and provides NOTHING in the way of actual health services. This is going to require carriers to create and staff an entire new division.

I don't think the actual overhead you describe from the medical profession side of it is really exactly as you construe it either. Our biggest clients are insurance companies (vaguely we fall under rehab) and based on our own billing/collection experience, this aspect of the issue appears to be overblown as presented here. Sure there are occasional collection issues, but NOTHING like when I was doing painting/drywall for section 8 housing and tried to get paid from the D.C. Government! We don't fight over surgeries, so there are some apple/orange issues here but we are certainly defined as a provider under HR3200.

And the last paragraph doesn't make sense to me. Most of the outrageous behavior (preexisting conditions, recision, etc.) theoretically keep premium costs down. There is nothing that I saw in any of these bills that would keep them from simply rolling the increased cost of health coverage into premiums. A lot of this has to do with how they handle medical loss ratios, which would be set by the commissioner(HR3200) but are not defined with any hard numbers in the legislation. If they set the ratios within the ballpark of today's expenditures, the influx of people who are actually sick and using services could very well create the conditions for a spike in premiums while staying well within the mandated ratios.

Which brings me to my final point, it seems like the penalties have nice hard numbers and the consumer protections are generally "at the discretion of the Secretary/Commissioner" to be defined after the legislation is passed. I'd really like to see a hard number attached to stuff like the medical loss ratios against the ability for them to say I'd owe 2.5% of my income if I can't/won't participate. But really, we've taken a discussion you don't want to have about specific mechanics of the mandates and sort of meandered into a discussion of the whole bill. Which is fine, but IMO it would be more appropriate on a post where the language of relevant portions of the bill had been highlighted so that we can all be on the same page with the discussion. There is more to it than mandates, but mandates can not be ignored.

I'm in favor of HR3200, but I'm not going to blow sunshine up anyone's ass and pretend it's a really, really great a bill. What I am not willing to accept the Baucus version.

Not looking for you admiration. But if you want to sling ad hominems and implications of dishonesty - come correct with facts. I added my own "don't like it one bit" flavor, but really did try to be accurate. I'd still be interested in knowing where you think this is factually off base.

IMO, a hatchet job would have been to genuinely teabag the language and post it on RedState. How much you want to bet I could put something together that would go viral through that nut-log factory? Betcha I could make Limbaugh.

I'm trying to highlight the vise they've got our nuts in right now and bring into focus just how tenious the situation is. The democrats started negotiations almost in complete capitulation. For those acting like compromising more is possible without screwing us all, I think we need to discuss all the stakes here.

Will you still support the bill without a public option? I will not. I will use my voice to try and rally support for killing it. This seems to be a common progressive stance. There's always January unless we take something inadequate, then January is meaningless. The next shot with the way it's crafted would likely be 2015 at the earliest.