Mr. Obama’s own Medicare actuaries estimate that the federal share of U.S. health dollars will quickly climb beyond 60% from 46% today.

-WSJ

That’s not trivial. And it’s only going to be the beginning.

See, insurance companies have to keep a lot of cash in reserve in order to safely gard against risk. That money belongs to the stockholders. It can be invested, but it has to be fairly safe, low-yielding investments. If the premiums from the policies can’t make an additional contribution to the return on those investments, stockholders will simply take their money elsewhere.

They can claim all they want that “you can keep your current insurance”, but the public option is structurally going to cause your insurance company to withdraw from the market eventually.

At least Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein think so.

This is no argument. I still call bullshit. It does not follow from this that a public option is a legitimate “backdoor way to set up universal healthcare…designed to torpedo the current healthcare insurance market, forcing everyone to “chose” government insurance”. A future left wing administration could just as easily expand medicare/medicaid to accomplish the same thing in the even of a “crisis”. The public option is no trojen horse as you claim.

I call bullshit.

Here is the argument, in brief:

The “public option” is supposed to make healthcare available for those that don’t currently have it. But everyone could be insured privately, at the right price. Those who aren’t insured today aren’t willing or able to pay the fair market price that the insurance companies would charge them, or else the insurance companies aren’t allowed to charge enough to make covering them worthwhile to their bottom line. In either case, it is obvious that the public option will cover these people by charging them less money than it costs to insure them. (It’s not politically feasible that anyone will be charged more than they can “afford” to get their public option coverage.) They will not pay the full cost of their medical care, and therefore the public option will not be self-funding. We will run a deficit or raise taxes or whatever.

It should go without saying that savings from cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” will retain their mythological status.

The program will therefore manifest itself as a big wealth transfer. At a certain level of income, the public option may transition into charging people full cost rates, but by definition those are going to be people who can afford to get their own insurance. The insurance companies aren’t going to be able to compete for anyone that qualifies for a subsidized rate, and that is going to be roughly everyone who doesn’t have insurance today, plus those who are added over time as our definition of “need” expands. Don’t forget, those with subsidized rates are going to spend their savings on housing and other cost-of living items, bidding up prices for those who don’t qualify and putting more pressure on the eligibility requirements to include ever more Americans.

Then one day when the eligibility requirements for subsidized rates haven’t been tweaked in a few years, and pendulum of political power has swung to the left as it has today, they are going to announce another “crisis”, and “solve” it by instituting a single payer system, which at that point will be considered a moderate expansion of an existing program.

That the public option is a trojan horse for single payer coverage has been admitted by Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Barney Frank (D-MA), Ezra Klein, and Paul Krugman. Interestingly, those last two are precisely the people whose arguments for reform have been cited on this website.

I call bullshit.

A local hospital would, ideally, be run by the church, and have thus have no real profit motive. The local magistrate typically funded the salaries of clergy, and helped religious orders out with projects such as hospitals. This was seen as a gift from his personal wealth. He could also keep tabs on the order, and choose to withhold funds if they were wasteful. If the hospital was short on resources or services, the local parishes could ask for donations at the pulpit.

The key here is personal involvement by members and the head of the community, as well as charitable giving, which is in all ways better than taxation.

My premise for supporting a monarchy over a republic is as follows:

1) The Church has held, by (arguably non-binding) tradition that Monarchy is the best form of government. Monarchs are used as symbols in the bible. God instituted the ancient line of Hebrew kings, and Jesus was born, quite significantly, of the house of David. Christ is the King of kings, not of presidents and prime ministers.
2) modern liberal democratic republics justify themselves by claiming that the power to rule is derived from a mandate of the masses. We know, as Christians, that this is not so. Power comes from God, and God alone. To reject this is offensive.
3) A proper Catholic monarchy is held in check by the church. For instance, the election of the Holy Roman Emperor can be vetoed by the pope. In many kingdoms, the monarch would be deposed if apostatized or excommunicated, thereby giving the bishops authority to keep the monarch in check.
4) Monarchies tended to be smaller governments that taxed it citizens less than republics. Even if the monarch and his family were greedy, it doesn’t take nearly as much theft from the populous to satisfy his ambitions, compared to the ambitions of the president, his cabinet, 104 Senators, 500+ congresscritters, their staff, lobbiests, etc., etc., etc.
5) Monarchies tend to have very little control over the day-to-day lives of its citizens. Society was very tiered; a monarch didn’t directly tax his citizens, but instead demanded tribute from his dukes, who demand it from the tier under them. Life from one community to another could be vastly different; if one marquis was charging too much in taxes, they could move over to the next town.
6) In hereditary monarchy, the most important unit of government is family. This communicates to society, by example, the importance of the nuclear and extended families, from the top down.
7) The fact that rule monarchy is de jure exclusive, rather than de facto in a republic, it quells political ambitions of men. Peasants know that they can never be king, and thus will not try. This quells the problem of an ever-growing leech-like political class we see in modern republics.
Hereditary monarchs are typically on the throne for life, and thus can make real, meaningful changes to the long-term benefit of his people. He has a strong vested interest in leaving the nation in a better state than he received it, because his family’s name is synonymous with the nation.
9) Most monarchs actually have less real power than modern bureaucrats, even though they had real authority. To get anything big done, like a war, they would have to convince the nobles under them, who in turn would convince the peasants to follow them. Thus, the monarch needed a fair degree of consent to get anything really big done.

There’s many more points that favor monarchy, but that’s on the top of my head.