We are being pounded with the dogma that affordable health care should be available to every American. But, knowing there is a large segment of the population that can’t afford insurance or choose not to buy insurance even if they could afford it, that means this segment, now uninsured will get free health care. Today, none from these groups are denied health care. The first group has no assets, so no payment will be collected, you get to pay for that in your insurance premiums. The second group, if they have assets, will find the people who provided health care will expect them to pay. They will work out payments plans, etc.
Isn’t this just like, in a rich country like America, everyone should own their own house? How did that work out?
Americans have always felt we should never be out of pocket for health care? Does that make sense? If you choose to give a new car or flat screen TV greater priority than your health or the health of your family, should you get a pass if you gambled and lost?
There is no logic in any of the bunk coming out of Washington on the proposed health care plans.
If you can get health insurance with a preexisting condition, and millions are in that situation, how does that not increase the cost of health care in this country? Premiums have to be raised to offset that huge incremental cost. Look at Massachusetts. The insurance premiums are now higher than anywhere in the country. For this reason.
If millions now have free health care, how does the system accommodate the load? Just as it has everywhere this plan is in place, by rationing. If you believe rationing isn’t mandatory with this plan, please tell me how a strained system take on 25% more volume without rationing.
The poor today have free health insurance with medicaid. The elderly have it with medicare. Both systems have huge inefficiencies and are beset with fraud. The new proposal is going to take cost out of medicare. How, by reducing the benefits to medicare patients and through rationing.
Today I heard two people talk about how they felt about the new plan. One young woman said she developed cancer and is in remission. She has thousands in bills and is having trouble paying. She had insurance but it was not appropriate for a catastrophic illness. She favors the new proposal. But, she had stage four cancer. If the new plan was in effect, she would be debt free, but dead. The second said he was diagnosed with cancer as a young man. It was a difficult diagnosis and took lots of tests to find the cancer. Without all the tests he would have died. He would not have gotten the tests with the new program.
This is a different version of sharing the wealth, called sharing the health. To provide health insurance to 14 million people uninsured, the rest of the country must accept rationing, the government deciding their health care choices, and higher premiums or higher taxes or both.
To accommodate a few million people who never could afford a new house, we had to destory the economy here and abroad. The same people who created that mess are up to their eyeballs in this mess.
Mitt Romney is polling ahead of Obama if a presidential election were held today. But, until Mitt comes clean on the mess he made in Massachusetts with his health care program, he has no chance.
I guess my thinking is wrong, but I have always felt it is not wrong or unfair to pay someone out of pocket if they save my life, the life of a family member, or make us well.
If everyone in America had to have a catastrophic insurance policy with a deductible tied to net worth, it would solve most of the problems. Just like auto insurance. If you don’t have the policy, you don’t drive a car, can’t get a job, or must pay into a uninsured fund.
From zero to that deductible, you take your risk. If you gamble wrong, it will be a reasonable gamble, since you are covered on the upside.
This means health care is only free to the destitute, as it is now with medicaid.
There is no free lunch and there should be no free health care. It’s like rent.