OK, so what’s to keep someone, or multiple someones (competition!) from setting up off-shore gambling sites where, based on their age, gender, medical and family history, people can make bets on whether or not their annual medical expenses will exceed some selected amount? Currency controls?
The fact that the federal government would fight this is a stark testament to what a huge encroachment on liberty this monstrosity is.
Yes, currency controls. Government is the enemy. How is it they could take millions of dollars of silver and lock up that guy in Idaho holding it for others? They didn’t go after him for some Madoff scheme. They just said, “it was coins and you can’t have any so we’re taking it.”
You can keep your flat round medallions as long as they don’t have value that competes with the stuff we say has value but doesn’t actually.
Make it “stock” not “gambling”.
Shares of the “John Doe Life Insurance”.
Then add “futures” for the John Doe Life Insurance….
Of course, being allowed to short someone else’s life insurance (aka I bet -he- won’t make it to Thursday) is problematical.
IOW: Gambling just needs new jargon.
It’s always had new jargon which means politicians get to define terms.
Hard to stop such a thing if you do it with Bitcoin and Tor.
But then you have to find health-care providers who accept those currencies, unless they’re easily convertible to cash.
Converting to and from cash is easy enough, but the trouble is that its price is very volatile. That might change if lots of people started using it, but it’s one of those chicken egg problems like high launch volume and affordable space launch.
I don’t know if it’s still true, but there used to be an easy way to just buy “Amazon Gift Cards”. I think it was ‘direct from Amazon’, but perhaps not.
Regardless, more liquid than a bag of silver coins.
Until the IRS declares that the online-currency-du-jour is de facto tax evasion and comes down like a ton of lead bricks… and, thanks to the supine posture of internet providers, not only does the currency “backer” get sledgehammered, but every user gets a bill for back taxes plus penalties. Assuming that they aren’t the ones chosen to be examples, that is: in that case, they get the bill and twenty years.
This is one of the loopholes what the individual mandate was supposed to stop, isn’t it? After they ramp up the penalty (er, tax?) to it’s final value, the cost of your insurance-misnamed-as-gambling plus the IRS fine is supposed to exceed the cost of just buying their redistribution-misnamed-as-insurance.
Aside from the fact this market can be easily rigged?
Markets work well in physical goods with implicit delivery
Futures for Coal, FCOJ, Hogs, sugar.
if Goldman can rig LIBOR, it’s childs play for this to be rigged.
“Aside from the fact this market can be easily rigged?”
Typical lefty knee-jerk response…..anti-market with zero thought. You sure you’re not Jim?
1) Where did you get the quaint notion that a government run system cannot and will not be rigged? The evidence that they are is all around you. Bernie Madoff is a piker compared to Scam Artist Obama.
2) It’s MUCH easier to figure out and apply anti-rigging laws than it is to figure out the entire health care market.
Aside from the fact this market can be easily rigged?
So can Obamacare. I don’t hear you complaining about that.
if Goldman can rig LIBOR, it’s childs play for this to be rigged.
The thing to remember about the LIBOR scandal is that Goldman and these other companies were asked for numbers without verification. It’s like taking the insuree’s word for granted without bothering to check whether the medical expenses actually happened or not. If you do that, of course, it’s going to be easy to rig.
A deeper problem is how does the betting market get access to the necessary medical information? I think the obvious government strategy here would be to make it illegal for a US health provider to supply medical information of any sort to these betting markets. If it is then known that betting markets require proof of medical costs in order to pay out, then collecting on such a bet would be an indication that a crime took place.
“if Goldman can rig LIBOR, it’s childs play for this to be rigged”
How dare you say such harsh things about prominent Democratic Party backers and Obama donors!
If someone is a bum IMHO, I’ll call it, without regards to their donor status.
I have no love for Corzine and MF Global.
It’s a comment that so little noise was made about Corzine.
Since you brought him up, isn’t it cool how Obama didn’t bring him up on charges? Even though Democrats love to attack banks and stereotype Republicans as being controlled by them, there is a cozy relationship between Democrats and bankers. Money and personnel pass freely between the two groups as they get rich off each other.
Support of this relationship is yet another contradiction of Democrat “ideals.”
To rig things you need near monopoly power. Enough competitors of nearly the same size eliminates rigging unless they collude. Collusion is anticompetitive and can be regulated to a degree.
So what’s to keep… is a bigger question. What I see is a society trained to see government having the right to tell people what to do so they don’t even contemplate possible actions. This is not the world we used to live in. These are not the people that used to live in it.