Reply #60: To take your points one by one:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. $1000 a month with a $5000 deductible means that you pay $17,000 a year before you get any benefit. If you have diabetes, you're better off spending that $17,000 on office visits, meds, and supplies.

2.
a) The caps on premiums are unrealistically high in the case of the premiums (AND, in a little-noticed provision, they're raising the percentage of income that you have to meet to deduct medical expenses from your income tax from 7.5% to 10%. In other words, if you make $50,000 a year, you have to have $3700 in medical expenses before you can deduct them. The bill would raise that to $4000.)

All subsidies fade out at about $42,000 for a single person, and above that, you can be charged 10% of your income.

2. The subsidies are pure corporate welfare and besides, will require a massive bureaucracy to administer.

4. We can always put in price controls later? On private companies? Even Nixon couldn't manage that one.

5. Medicare and Medicaid are already government programs.