Senate Health Care Bill

If you are the government, how do you raise the money for the health care bill. In addition to tax on high end insurance, you impose "fees" on drug, devices sales and insurance premiums in general.

W.r.t sec 6008, 6009, 6010 of Title VI, Subtitle A of Senate bill S.1796, it seems that government wants to get 2.3 billion from drug manufacturers, 4 billion from device manufacturers and 6.7 billion from insurance firms. The way they go around doing this is making each company pay a percentage of that amount based on the money they get in. Drug manufacturers / importers pay a percentage proportional to ratio of their drug sale income to the whole industry drug sale income. Device manufacturers and Insurance companies are similarly taxed. Note that this is not proportional to profit, just basic income!

Any tax of these companies would be a tax on consumers. Where else do they make money from? We can expect premiums, drug prices and device prices to go up. By putting this stupid money raising scheme in place, the government has ensured that costs for the US population is going to be some significant multiple of 13 billion (2.3 + 4 + 6.7) dollars. If the companies have to pay regular taxes plus this fee, surely they will have to rake in something which is a significant multiple of 13 billion dollars.

I am quite sure that the companies currently do make trillions of dollars. We just ensured that cost is not going to go down.

Voter Inflation (2)

wrt my last post, I should retract ... no, that would happen for an ideal government. Now you just need to become a lobbyist and surely your children can be too ...

Vote Inflation?

When citizen population of a democratic country rises, the vote of an always existing citizen counts "less" during an election. In the US, only the house tries to have members proportional to the population. The senate and the executive branch however have fixed number of members, so each senator or the president will have more and more voters. Since their votes count less, does this mean that a citizen effectively loses power over time? This surely means that if you want to influence the political setting of a country, you should have lots of children and teach them your political beliefs :^)