Nylander Healthcare Reform Planning

[Seperallis]

should have passed it then o/

And miss the chance at electoral drama? No way!

But seriously, there's some good ideas in it that'd be cool if they were transferred over. Couple actual questions though.

Does this Medicare have all the power of regular insurance agencies? That is, can it "negotiate " prices? One of RL Medicare's coat problems is its inability to negotiate prices. Of course, if you have price controls, it becomes irrelevant, but I'm just working with what you got.

Second, is the new 10% tax in addition to or replacing the 2.5% voucher (or "health insurance" as I wrote on the spreadsheet) payroll tax?

[Flo]

I feel like we need to initiate price controls eventually anyway, but for now I think we should have our Medicare be able to negotiate a la any old insurance company. By not including price controls now we give future legislatures something to do lol

This new 10% tax would likely replace the old 2.5% one. Did that 2.5% tax have an upper threshold like real social security tax irl? I don't think real life medicare tax has an upper bound, but I know social security tax starts to taper off at a certain point... Or at least I think I remember that it does.

Also, do you think 10% could actually cover something like this? I don't have the budget numbers in front of me lol

[Seperallis]

Boooo, we have enough to do.

Eh, maybe. We'd have to run numbers on the likely cost, but the increased taxes should go from the current $179B (lol yeah, the voucher's so underfunded, woops) to about $716B? So it's a good bit more. Social Security is currently largely overfunded, though; that could be dropped, even after any possible reforms or expansions.

All in 1573 dalers. I really need to update that.

Speaking of which, are we dropping the income tax?

[Flo]

That is coming later, but I am looking to adjust taxes. I can't really say I'm dropping income tax, because I'm really only dropping it for low income folks and doing some playing with the brackets. If we want all these nice things, military, healthcare, etc., we would need revenues.

No rush, but if you get the budget sorta fleshed out I could figure out what taxes should be, more or less, to ensure people at the bottom don't get hit so heavily