There’s been a lot of talk about excessive public pensions recently. A lot of it has been smoke and mirrors, with outrage about 50-year-olds retiring with 100% pay. I think it’s pretty obvious, if you calm down a little, that retirement packages for people in public safety roles that require intense physicality should be a bit different than for desk jockeys. If your house is on fire and your children are trapped upstairs, do you really want a ladder truck full of 63-year-olds to be your first responders? I didn’t think so.

Anyhow, it is true that public servants in California have pretty nice pension plans available. My wife, if she sticks around until she’s 55 years old, will be able to retire immediately with over half of her take-home pay and just about all of her benefits. That’s a big part of why it makes sense for her to stick around instead of seeking her fortune in the private sector. If we’re going to keep hiring new public employees, we’re going to have to attract them to their positions. We don’t conscript our DMV employees, so we have to pay them enough to get them to show up and stay and do their work. The current pension system is widely seen as an albatross around our state budget’s neck, but what should we do about it?

Let it burn. Keep the pension system substantially the same, and simply negotiate harder every time the public employee unions’ contracts expire. Here you run a serious risk of generating a lot of bad blood among the cogs that make the machine go forward. Work slow-downs and strikes would be more or less inevitable, and we could see a lot of our younger state workers simply jump ship for the private sector. This may not be the worst solution in the long run, but would require an inordinate amount of political courage.

Switch to 401(k). This tends to strike the general public and eminently fair. Private retirement plans in individual accounts are how most folks in this country build up their nest eggs, so why not public employees? Well, basically for the same reason that switching out Social Security for private accounts isn’t really feasible: without a continuing input of funds, the system dries up and leaves current beneficiaries stranded. These pensions are the result of negotiated contracts, and contracts have to be honored; if the state starts breaking its promises it cannot be trusted in future dealings like future labor negotiations, leases, or bond sales.

Two-tier Pensions. As a straight proposition, this makes a lot of sense, too. Existing employees are under and existing contract, so they keep their pensions. The state isn’t necessarily bound to extend those terms to new employees, so we set up a tier-two ghetto pension for new hires. This is probably how it will have to go down. I see the following levers that can be adjusted for our new second-class public servants:

• Years served. The CalPERS pension schedule allows for retirement after as few as 5 years. This yields a maximum pay-out of only 12.5% of salary, but when you consider life expectancy in this country, that can add up in a hurry. A person that works for a CalPERS position from age 58 to retirement at 63 can be expected to live to about 84 years old. That’s 7.6 years of pay for 5 years of work. By comparison, a 23-year-old that gets a job and holds it down until he’s 63 would keep 100% pay upon retirement. He’s likely to make it to 80 years old (from the same CDC data) and will draw down 57 years pay for 40 years of work. That ratio’s just messed up. Younger workers are a better pension buy.
• Retirement age. For positions that aren’t intrinsically hostile to older workers, bump down the vested portion of the pay scale way down for younger retirees. Fully-vested retirement payouts shouldn’t be available until the same age as full Social Security payouts. I think this is an option that most people looking to enter public service would recognize as reasonable, and would save the taxpayers years of personnel-years of double-pay for the same work.
• The definition of the salary basis. For most retired public employees, their pension payments are based on a three factors: the number of years worked, the employee’s age at retirement, and the highest full year of pay earned during that time. This last item is the biggest source of concern when enraged citizens write in to their local newspaper’s editorial staff. There are some high-profile people like city managers and department heads that pull down rather alarming salaries as their base, unmodified pay. That has to be dealt with on an individual basis, but a lot of other folks puff up their retirement rates artificially with last-year promotions and special bonuses. A police officer, for example, gets additional compensation for SWAT qualification. Transportation department workers get additional pay for working outside where they are exposed to traffic. A lot of these bonuses are cumulative and become quite substantial. Maybe they shouldn’t factor in for retirement purposes; make the base pay for pension payouts exclude these bonuses and a fair amount of the anger-inducing individual pensions become much more palatable.

Assuming the politicians, voters, and union members involved aren’t willing to take the “let it burn” option, it seems that introducing a second-tier pension plan with adjustments to the retirement age and years served factors, along with an adjustment to how the basis pay is calculated is a pretty reasonable way forward.

In the American political arena we hear a lot of talk about tax cuts and economic stimulus spending. Tax cuts are nearly always thought of as reductions in the income tax, capital gains tax, or estate tax. Stimulus spending is nearly always thought of in terms of infrastructure projects (either through direct spending to contractors or through state and local governments). The stated goal in both cases is to get more money into consumers’ pockets that they will then spend back into the economy (through investment, grocery shopping, hookers and blow, whatever). A couple of key points keep getting skipped in the discussion:

Tariffs and Food Stamps.

When it comes to tax policy, there are very few people that work for a living and wouldn’t like a little less of their paychecks to evaporate before hitting their bank accounts. Any attempt to cover important government expenditures such as providing for the national security or honoring our Medicare and Social Security obligations through taxation is generally opposed as counter-productive. When you wish to discourage a behavior, you tax it. With this notion in mind, why tax people for being successful in a career that is in high demand? This is the argument that the working poor lean on when they vote for politicians that will slash the taxes of the fabulously-wealthy and cut programs that they might personally benefit from.

Income, capital gains, and estate taxes are all quite low right now by historical standards, and all relate to endeavors that the American public largely think of as Good. Work hard, invest wisely, pass your legacy on to your children. Baseball and Apple Pie right there, folks. But we didn’t always have an income tax. Where did we get the money to pay for our government before that? From another tax that is at a historic low: tariffs.

A tariff is a tax levied on imported goods. When you get a $200 tax cut and go buy yourself a new flat-screen television, a portion of your purchase price goes to your local sales tax. A portion goes to the taxes paid on the profit your retailer made on the transaction and contributed to the bottom line for that retailer paying its employees, who pay all the sames kinds of taxes you personally hate to pay. If you bought something made in this country, like maybe a nice new gun safe, you’d have the same sales and retailer taxes, plus the money for the manufacturer stays in-country where more taxes hit at the company and employee level, and the employees turn around and buy things for themselves, keeping the wheels turning and returning a lot more value for the $200 hit to the federal debt.

Low wages in foreign countries make it cheap to build things in places like China and Malaysia. Improvements in the efficiency of container-based shipping make it cheap to transfer goods across oceans. Super-low tariffs keep it cheap to get goods through customs. If we want to see American factory jobs start to increase again, one or more of these things need to change. Either the wages need to even out (higher Malaysian and Chinese pay or lower American pay) or the costs of shipping need to jump up (oil costs haven’t really put a dent in this yet), or the tariffs need to go up. Of the three, exactly one is under the direct control of our elected officials. Tariffs are a lever we have to influence the direction of trade, and are a subject practically foreign to public debate these days.

My proposal: tie the tariff rates directly to the official unemployment rate. Have a general tariff set at 5% plus the standing unemployment rate. Adjust this rate quarterly, by no more than half a percent per adjustment in either direction (this would help smooth out sudden changes and provide for a more predictable environment for businesses). With such a tariff scheme in place, when the United States job market is strong, our prosperous citizenry will be able to import goods willy-nilly, and when our job market is anemic, businesses will have all the more incentive to on-shore their operations lest Uncle Sam claw back arbitrarily-large chunks of their profit margins.

On the other end of the scale is stimulus spending. If you want to spend money you don’t have, you should at least get as much bang for your buck as you can. Tax cuts aren’t a good bet, because for every dollar of tax cuts less than a dollar of new economic activity is created. Pumping money into state and local governments doesn’t fare much better. What gets the best return? Food Stamps. For every dollar spent on Food Stamps, somewhere between $1.70 and $1.84 worth of economic activity is created. The money spent through food stamps tends to get re-spent within our economy, not sent off-shore or hoarded. A lot of that economic activity ends up paying for jobs for workers that pay taxes that pay for you roads and schools and fire fighters.

Encourage jobs, stay out of my wallet, everybody’s happy.

It’s June, that time of year when a Californian voter’s thoughts turn to ballot initiatives. This year we’ve got four items up for some direct democracy, propositions 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17.

Prop 13

No, not that Prop 13. This one seeks to change what amounts to an oversight that discourages landowners from performing seismic retrofits on some older buildings. Major renovations can cause a property to be reassessed at its current market value instead of whatever it was originally purchased for, which can deal a substantial hit to one’s bottom line. I’m in favor of seismic retrofits, and it looks like there’s no Trojan Horse going on here. I don’t know of anybody that’s seriously opposed to this one.

Prop 14

Open primaries. There’s a loaded phrase among the politically-enthusiastic. Proposition 14 seeks to allow all voters to weigh in on all candidates during the primaries, regardless of registered party affiliation. I’ve been against private clubs holding their little selection lotteries at public expense for a while now; I’m registered as an independent, so for years my primary ballots were mighty thin. The top two vote-getters would proceed to the November ballot.

There has been a bit of a fuss over this. We’ve got some very entrenched districts in the Golden State. There are areas where the Democratic candidate may as well not bother putting himself on the ballot; he’ll lose. In other areas, the Republican candidate faces the same sorry state of affairs. With only registered Democrats getting to vote for their party candidate and only registered Republicans getting to vote for theirs, we end up with candidates targeting very narrow demographics with their campaigns. In Orange County if you can get about 13% of the population to vote you in as the Republican candidate, it’s smooth sailing from there. This leads to some fairly extreme candidates from both parties.

The argument against Prop 14 comes in a couple of flavors: third parties will be shoved off the November ballot, the two richest candidates will go on to the general election, taxes will go up because we won’t have a minority army of Howard Jarvis‘s brainwashed sex slaves in Sacramento. Ok, that last was an exaggeration. To these I answer:

• Minor parties don’t win general elections in California under the current system. By letting everybody vote, folks like the Peace & Freedom, Greens, and Libertarians have a greater chance of getting a toehold if they can field a strong candidate.
• Right now, in most districts, the two richest candidates are from the same party and they duke it out in June only to coast through November in their comfortably-gerrymandered districts. Now they’ll get to square off in a bigger field. We’ll see how that works out.
• Oh no, we run the horrible risk of some reasonably-moderate Democrats coming out of the Bay Area and some reasonably-moderate Republicans coming out of the Central Valley and Orange County. This could lead to reasonable policies and and functional state government. We run the terrible risk of getting our money’s worth for our taxes.

For those concerned that this may have a disproportionate impact for one major party over the other, please note that both cadem.org and cagop.org urge a “no” vote on this. I’m strongly inclined to vote yes on Proposition 14.

Prop 15

Proposition 15 seeks to establish public funding of some elected positions. This would be your standard “get the money out of politics” populist push. The affected positions would be:

• California Secretary of State

and that’s it. Just the Secretary of State. As somebody that’s been a consistent participant in every general, primary, and special election since I turned 18, I find this to be ludicrous. Nobody’s buying the position of Secretary of State. There aren’t huge media wars over this elected position. I’d wager that most voters in California couldn’t describe a single job function of Secretary of State if you asked them on the way out of their polling places. I understand that this is meant to be some kind of a test-bed incremental approach to eventually divorcing special interest money from California politics, but applying it to a single position like this is half-assed, piss-ant, and not something I’m interested in supporting.

Prop 16

Proposition 16 seeks to address the problem of local governments taking over the electrical utilities, taking them from heavily-regulated bastions of free market economics to oppressive monoliths of socialist bureaucracy. Alas, this is a problem that isn’t really happening. Your city and county are broke. They aren’t going to buy out the electrical utility, and even if they do is that such a terrible thing? This proposition places a higher standard of public approval on starting a local utility than passing a constitutional amendment (still only 50% of the popular vote +1 in California).

Back in 2001 we had some Enron shenanigans, rolling brownouts in California, and a general failure of a regulated free market to deliver utilities to the people of this state. I know of a single municipal electric utility nearby: Healdsburg. They have lower rates than PG&E offers here in Santa Rosa, and had no brownouts. This proposition gives me the opportunity to require a public referendum (with a 2/3rd majority requirement) to get more reliable service for less. I see no good reason to vote yes on this.

Prop 17

Proposition 17 is like Prop 16 but with a potential for real impact on individuals. Mercury Insurance has run into some problems with California regulations that allow auto insurance providers to provide customer loyalty discounts but don’t allow competing companies to match a consumer’s existing loyalty discount. This means that if you’ve been with All State for ten years and want to shop around for better rates, All State gets a regulatory advantage to try to keep you.

To fight this, Mercury wants to be able to provide discounts based on continuity of coverage. If you’ve been with All State for five years, then switch to Geico for five more years, then seek to switch over to Mercury, you’d be eligible for the same discount as if you’d just stayed with All State that whole time. If you let your coverage lapse, the discount wouldn’t be available to you any more (it wouldn’t have been to start with, but this is the main rebuttal I’ve seen). Proposition 17 ostensibly opens up the auto insurance market to more aggressive competition between companies.

The catch here is that nothing changes about the regulations regarding the overall account balances of auto insurance companies. If a company gives away $10 million in discounts to one group of customers, they have to make up for that somewhere else on their books; that is to say they have to raise rates elsewhere to the tune of $10 million. In this case, any savings realized by the consistently-insured would be paid for by new drivers (with no insurance history) or those who have let their coverage lapse.

There’s an easy argument to be made that jerks driving around uninsured don’t deserve good rates after putting the rest of us at an increased risk. There’s also an easy heartstrings-pulling argument to be made that some people go without need of auto insurance for reasons outside their control. Maybe somebody’s job puts him in a position where he doesn’t need his own vehicle for a prolonged period. Maybe it’s a military deployment. Upon returning there has been a lapse in coverage, and our noble war hero is stuck with an inflated insurance bill.

This proposition has been largely funded by an insurance company looking to make a specific maneuver in the market, much like how Prop 16 is basically PG&E’s attempt to protect its monopoly. Prop 17, however, addresses a situation I actually see as affecting how Californians are getting by. This isn’t a theoretical bungled takeover by city or county bureaucrats; it’s a way that I might be able to shift a few bucks of insurance burden off to another demographic.

A lot of liberals, progressives, hippies, and Democrats have been complaining about obstructionist tactics by the Republicans since President Obama took office. On the radio I keep hearing demands that the Democrats take a page out of the old Republican majority playbook and deploy the “Nuclear Option” (aka the “Constitutional Option” to use the Republican terminology of the time). I thought that was a bad idea when the R’s were pushing it, and I still think it’s a bad idea when the D’s are being pushed by their base to use it.

The filibuster allows for a state with a small congressional delegation to stand firm in the face of a narrow majority on issues that are of great importance. If a senator strongly feels that the country, his constituents, or his principles are put at risk, he can force an issue to be tabled until a supermajority can shut him up via cloture or his objections can be addressed. This is a good thing.

How filibusters are used currently, however is not. The barest threat of objection now leads to cloture votes, nominations being set aside indefinitely, all at basically no cost to the obstructionist senator. Please note that I don’t think “obstructionist” is a bad thing in itself. There have been lots of bad laws passed and bad appointees approved for lack of vigorous and reasonable obstruction. It is currently possible for a senator to obstruct a bill without any appreciable effort or expenditure of political capital. That’s what needs to change. If a senator really wants to stop a bill or appointment, the rest of the senate should require that he stick his neck out a bit.

A couple of ideas that attempt to balance the value of the filibuster and other delaying tactics with the problems involved in its overuse:

• Bills and appointments should only be remanded to committee or otherwise tabled once introduced by a supermajority of senators present or on a simple majority upon a failed cloture motion. This would force a senator to stop the business of the Senate as a whole in order to stop a bill. It would probably cause more cloture votes, but less actual delay.
• Should a senator object to considering a bill or amendment “as read” (this currently forces the clerk to read the entire bill aloud, which can be quite onerous with long legal documents), then the objecting senator is responsible for reading the bill himself. He may share the burden with other senators that volunteer to do so, but may not physically leave the Senate chamber during the reading. Should the objecting senator leave the chamber for any reason, the bill will be considered “as read” for procedural purposes. If the senator actually has not read the bill, he can damn well read it himself.
• All requests to delay committee votes or meetings must be publicly associated with the delaying senator. Frequently there are legitimate reasons for committees to not immediately take up an item; there may be reports demanded of various agencies, experts or witnesses to be scheduled for questioning and exposition, and so forth. Anonymous holds on whole swaths of issues need to stop.

None of these measures would stop the filibuster or unduly infringe on the rights and responsibilities of the individual senators to do right by their constituents, but each attaches a risk or burden in doing so.

California’s budget is a mess, and has been since the big dot-com bubble burst. This is nothing new, and has been a political campaign topic at the state level for about ten years now. I don’t post about it much, but somehow every time KC Meesha gretches about his taxes, I end up steamed and monopolizing his comment section. I totally understand where he’s coming from on paying taxes in a town where he works but doesn’t live, and delight in pointing out the fact that he’s unable to do anything about it. I think he takes it quite well.

What got my goat, however, was a flyover-dweller bitching about California looking to get a little money from the federal government to cover our budget shortfall. Specifically “I Travel for JOOLS” brought this up:

And I just ran across this little article. The money quote, California’s unionized public employees can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of their last year’s pay FOR LIFE !

AND THEY WANT US TO BAIL THEM OUT ????

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803593.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

First, pensions are paid by the pension fund, not by the state directly. Second, she’s citing an article by George Will, who doesn’t know his ass from his elbows regarding how California spends its money. Third, she’s using all-caps, which I find obnoxious. Fourth, she’s using excessive punctuation (one question-mark is sufficient, folks). All of this just serves to raise my hackles regardless of the actual merit of her point, which is rather seductive: California is spending its way into this mess, why should the rest of the country be burdened by this?

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Where does California get its money? Specifically the general fund money that our congress-critters get to fiddle with every year? ebudget.ca.gov provides a nice little summary:

Mostly from income taxes and sales taxes. I see money come out of my paycheck every week on one, and see the other nearly every time I buy anything. I’d just as soon leave these alone or lower them.

Where does the money go? Again, ebudget provides a summary:

Education takes up almost 58% of the state budget. Ouch. That looks like a great place to look for fat to trim. It’s also a political landmine to go anywhere near that portion of the budget without alarming reactionary parents and grandparents. Grandparents vote, you see.

Health and Human Services makes up the next biggest slice of general fund, at about $21,000,000,000. This is the nebulous government waste that I think most libertarians and tea-party types are talking about most of the time that they whinge about government waste. If the federal congress were actually trying to fix health care, this could have been reduced significantly (partly through increase systemic efficiency but largely through federal spending). But they aren’t.

Which brings us to: where the hell is all my tax money going?

I pay my taxes like a good citizen. I look for whatever deductions and credits I may be legally eligible, of course, but I understand that taxes are the price I pay for having a variety of safeguards and comforts that many others in the world don’t enjoy (into religion? love guns? hate paying taxes? you’d love it in Somalia!). But the bulk of the money coming out of my paycheck doesn’t go to Sacramento. It goes to Ogden, Utah. Where the IRS collects my annual 1040 form. So what happens to Californians’ federal tax money?

On the California income tax table, if you earn $70,000 a year (median income for a family of four in the state), and you somehow haven’t managed to deduct your way down to a lower bracket, you pay $2,304 in state income tax. Conversely, the US income tax for that bracket is $9881. That’s a very sloppy calculation, based on $70,000 taxable income without all the typical deductions and such, but really it’s just to demonstrate the proportions involved. I can expect to pay a quarter as much to the state as I do to the federal government in income taxes. It’s a good thing that comes back through federal spending, right? Right?

California produced $313,998,874,000 in gross tax revenue for the United States federal government in 2007. With a population of 36,553,215, that works out to $8,590 for every man, woman, and child. Meanwhile Missouri produced only $48,568,138,000 with their 5,878,415 people ($8,262 per capita). That’s OK, though; we have a progressive income tax, so states with higher typical wages will pay more taxes, and the difference isn’t really that high.

That said, we’re having to pull more of our weight internally than a lot of other states. For every dollar we pay into the federal government, we get $0.78 back. That’s $69,079,752,280 coming out of California taxpayers’ pockets that is landing in places like Missouri that gets back $1.29 in spending for every dollar of federal taxes they pay. Heck, it’s more than the entire tax contribution of that state by a significant margin. It’s also about 75% of our proposed state budget for next year.

I suggest that the Republicans in Sacramento have got it right: we don’t need to raise fees or taxes on Californians. I also suggest that Democrats in Sacramento have it right: we have much-needed health services, correctional institutions, and schools that really need to properly-funded. We need our representatives in Washington DC to start representing us better.

When the revised health care bill kicks its way back to the House of Representatives, Lynn Woolsey and other “progressive” Democrats should demand a better deal. If Woolsey isn’t going to get the public option she wants (much less single-payer), then she should get additional funding for the Palm Drive hospital in Sebastopol and the Sutter Medical Center in Santa Rosa. California should get the same kind of treatment Nebraska gets for Medicaid costs. If her party wants her to swallow her liberal principles to vote for an imperfect bill, she should bring home some bacon for her constituents.

The same goes for our other representatives of both major parties: put your constituents ahead of your party and secure funding for local projects. Your voters are paying for roads and bridges and schools and hospitals and army bases elsewhere, let that money flow back home.

*Mea culpa: I seem to have put a totally ludicrous figure on KC Meesha’s comments page about how much folks in Missouri pay per capita to the feds. I don’t know where that figure came from, but I noticed it while I was writing this up.

*edit: out of ignorance I had some gender pronouns wrong there.

You don’t get many profiles in political courage these days. You get some grandstanding, of course. There are plenty of nutcases that have been put in office, particularly at the state level and in the House of Representatives, sure. But every once in a while you get somebody like Ben Nelson that’s willing to recognize a situation for what it is and act appropriately, even at the risk of burning his colleagues and open himself up to pressure from his own party on a high-profile issue like health care reform.

Nelson isn’t a pro-choice Democrat. I’m not from Nebraska, but so far as I can tell he never has been. The people who voted for him weren’t looking to enshrine the reproductive rights of women. There was a perception that the health care reform bill before the Senate would result in taxpayer money subsidizing abortions, and the Democratic party was scratching and scraping for 60 votes to get cloture. Ben Nelson was in a position to be the 60th vote, the last senator to commit to a “yes” vote. He could have taken the easy route and gone with his party on an issue that was important to the president. He could have taken the somewhat harder route and stuck to his avowed principles regarding the sanctity of human life.

He did neither. He rolled up his sleeves and got to work for his constituents. He burned his party and his ideals, holding out until he could get the best deal possible for his state. Nebraska is set to enjoy a tremendous advantage in Medicare compensation, at a savings likely to total in the billions as health care costs increase for the other 49 states in coming years (barring any actual substantive reform, which doesn’t look likely at the moment). Good for you, Ben Nelson. Good for Nebraska. Bring home the bacon for your voters. I wish my representatives had done the same.

Let’s take a look at a few key indicators of how dangerous the Islamic Republic of Iran is compared to more responsible, civilized, and democratic states in the world. We’ll take this back to 1979, as nobody seriously thinks the current Iranian regime bears any responsibility for anything the Shah did.

I didn’t count United Nations peacekeeping missions as wars for this table. Iran’s invasion of Iraq gets an asterisk for what should be a fairly obvious reason: it was part of a war that started with Iran getting invaded, not the other way around. Compared to many of the more globally-influential powers in the world, Iran has pretty much kept it in their pants for the past thirty years.

With all the talk about “health care reform” going on these days, I figured I would eventually weigh in. Nobody is seriously proposing the adoption of a british-style health care system where the federal government owns the hospitals and employs the staff there. This isn’t health care reform, it is health insurance reform. If you are currently happy with your health care, that probably means you are either healthy or like your doctor. Nobody’s assuming control of your doctor.

My online tovarisch kcmeesha described the current push for health insurance reform as “hasty.” Hasty as in we’ve been arguing about the particulars since the early 1990’s when Clinton tried to get something done? Hasty like maybe we should let this situation simmer for another twenty years or so, when Medicare overruns are so ghastly that a trillion-dollar pricetag will look cheap? Politicians are not instrisically brave creatures. They act when pressured. They expose themselves to risk only when doing otherwise is more risky. Somebody has to apply pressure to them to get any real progress. Telling a congress-critter he has to act “or else” means nothing without a deadline. See how far the religious right has gotten with telling the Republicans to protect unborn babies; the pro-lifers enforce no deadline and get no action.

16-23% of private insurance premiums get eaten up by corporate bureaucracy, executive compensation, lobbying, and corporate profit (depending on the company in question). 97% of medicare’s revenue goes to patient care. If the government is inherently wasteful (generally this is true), then private insurance is six to thirteen times as wasteful. The health care reform act should consist of revising the existing medicare act to remove the phrase “over 65.” It would be more efficient and save billions of dollars. But that isn’t going to happen because, as I mentioned, congressmen are cowards.

Some of us would rather pay some honest taxes than fritter away a huge portion of our insurance premiums to a bunch of faceless vampires that primarily make their profit margins by denying care to sick customers.

HR3200, which nobody ever seems to honestly reference.