Our good friend Jeromy Brown of the Iowa Liberal has been ill recently, and according to his blog entry, he “nearly died a couple weeks ago.” Naturally, we all wish him a speedy recovery. But this part got to me:
- I have no health insurance myself, haven’t had it for 7 years. The doctor, upon hearing my condition, declared my first visit free and each subsequent one $20. I have no way of expressing my feelings about his generosity adequately.
While some slapdash methods have prevented further bleeding while my body rebuilds its blood supply, I will be requiring a $4000 operation as soon as I can get my hemoglobin up to a 10. $2000 is going on the credit card and the rest will be paid in installments.
I’ll manage just fine, and I’ll pay for that operation in time. I won’t tie my fate directly to the issue of healthcare for all, but there are some obvious parallels. In another country I would have gone to the doctor about 5 years ago for the operation I needed, had it taken care of, and never would have been flirting with death all these years later. Yet, as some rightwinger will surely be quick to point out, I coulda woulda shoulda gotten some job that gave me health insurance (I tried to be a Geico man like Mike, but they wouldn’t have me), or not blown the job I had 7 years ago that had me fully covered. Spending five years pursuing Hollywood in a less than ingenious manner was a choice I made (although obviously if it had paid off, I’d be a model of self-reliance). Choosing not to pay $500 a month to buy into my company’s health care plan (when I typically make $1500 a month) was a choice I made. I did make an honest attempt to try buying healthcare for me and my honeypie last year. It was basically an anti-bankruptcy plan that wouldn’t have covered the surgery I needed anyway, and after they rejected my honeypie for pre-existing conditions, I said, “Fuck it.”
So I can’t get the “YOU COULDA DONE SOMETHING” that rightwingers are so quick to offer out of my head, even though I didn’t have the option to run off to Fox News like Tony Snow when $168K and full health care coverage was breaking his back. It’s true. Somehow, somewhere, I could have done something different and been covered. Somebody, somewhere, has a job I could have elbowed them out of for that coverage. That person is getting health care coverage right now, and maybe they don’t even need it! It was my duty to make sure that I was the one with coverage and they were the one working two jobs with no coverage.
But what nags at me more is the question, must it really be that way? And is America better that way? Is a greater number of Americans competing for a shrinking supply of coverage for ever more expensive health care coverage what this nation needs? Me, I don’t give a fuck about myself so much, or obviously I might have done more in the past. But it’s the others
I can’t not think about the others, and what we’ve done to ourselves as a nation here. That’s why I support health care for all.
Now, Mr Brown has just told us that he could have had health insurance, but it would have cost too much: “Choosing not to pay $500 a month to buy into my company’s health care plan (when I typically make $1500 a month) was a choice I made.” But then he goes on to support universal health care, and that begs the question: why is he willing to use the power of government to force Americans to pay for coverage, whether they wish to participate or not, when he found it perfectly reasonable to take the decision not to pay for health care coverage himself?
This is made even more interesting by his article How can you possibly convince America to despise the Frosts? In it, he mentions our poor site,
Talking with Mike G. on the phone, I said, “Surely our rightwinger friends are all over this kid. Dana Pico quite likely, but Sharon surely is on this kid and his family like white on the Republican Party,
though he linked Sharon’s article (with which he is greatly displeased, only on her site, and not the one she posted here.
Mr Brown continued:
Not many Americans could easily be convinced to pass judgment on the Frosts. Both parents seem like intelligent ordinary people who do what they can with the skills they have. They’re not working at Burger King. They’ve got four kids, which means they didn’t have abortions or only have sex as often as they wanted children, thus pleasing conservatives and liberals alike (or displeasing both, if you’re feeling really fucking cynical).
Take those Americans who can be convinced that the Frosts are scamming greedy idiots who could have health insurance IF THEY ONLY WANTED IT ENOUGH. Now ask yourself, how many of them could sit there stoically and accept having themselves or a loved family member denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions. It’s one thing to see somebody you don’t know denied, but to experience it directly is quite another. Hearts and minds tend to get changed really quickly when the stakes are personal. Being told that you and your loved ones can’t get health care because you’re too sick already, and knowing that you can’t get better unless you get health care?
This is hugely interesting, because Mr Brown is defending the Frosts, who could have bought health insurance but chose not to do so, the exact same decision he took, as cited above. Mr Brown, at least, is facing the consequences of his decision, and paying for the procedure he needs himself; the Frosts want to charge it all to the taxpayers.
Our own former commenter Jesurgislac even jumped in (and the Iowa Liberal owes me for referring her to their site!), claiming that Sharon was heartlessness personified over the sad case of Diamonte Driver. Twelve-year-old Diamonte Driver died from an infection in his brain that had spread from an abscessed tooth. His mother had spent a lot of time looking for an oral surgeon who would accept Medicaid to remove six abscessed teeth from his younger brother, DeShawn, but due to a paperwork foul-up, she had lost the family’s Medicaid coverage.
Sharon noted that she could have taken Diamonte to the emergency room, which she did, though she did so too late. Jesurgislac wrote, concerning Sharon:
When I asked what free health care services had been available in Maryland that Deamonte Driver’s mother could plausibly have known about and taken her children to rather than trying to get a Medicaid dentist, Sharon didn’t answer except with wild claims that such free services were available anywhere and everywhere in the US.
But, of course, J knew all about the fact that Mr Driver’s mother took him to the ER, and got free care! As the report cited above noted, he was treated and then admitted to Children’s Hospital in the District of Columbia, all apparently for free, since the Medicaid coverage had lapsed. And Mr Driver’s mother had such a problem in finding a dentist who would accept Medicaid in the first place (before she either lost or realized that she had lost eligibility) because Medicaid payments are both low and slow.
A new commenter styling himself Captain Obvious wrote, in defense of the Frosts’ decision not to buy health insurance:
Of course, as a self-employed businessman, Mr Frost apparently never chose to pay his own health insurance!
Pay the bills or health insurance? Food on the table or health insurance? Pay the mortgage or health insurance?
Gee, I wonder?
And Mr Brown wrote:
- I won’t tie my fate directly to the issue of healthcare for all, but there are some obvious parallels. In another country I would have gone to the doctor about 5 years ago for the operation I needed, had it taken care of, and never would have been flirting with death all these years later.
While I have to cut Mr Brown some slack here, because he is being responsible and paying for his health care himself (though clearly being assisted by the surgeon’s charitable impulses), both Captain Obvious’ and his comments say the same thing: the people would have gotten health care — if someone else had paid for it!
Well, just who is “someone else?” Captain Obvious was writing in support of the Frosts, and Mr Brown mentioned life in “another country,” so I assume that both meant that the government was the someone else they thought ought to pay for health care.
And where does the government get the money to do this? Yup, you guessed it: it comes from you and me, in the form of taxes. Captain Obvious tried to make it sound as though the Frosts had no choice but to neglect their children¹ by not buying health insurance, that their choices were the seemingly more immediate necessities of life or health insurance, and that they really had no choice but to opt for the moire immediate necessities. But if the government were paying for health care, the Frosts would have had no choice but to pay for health care, in the form of increased taxes.
You see, the government doesn’t care whether you have bills to pay or need food on the table; if you earn money, Uncle Sam demands his cut. If you expect the government to pay for health care, then you had better expect the government to increase your taxes to pay for that health care.
The Democratic presidential candidates all have some form of health care plans out there, and some of them depend not on increasing taxes — directly — on individuals, but on requiring employers to provide health care coverage. That’s great, but it’s simply a way of hiding the increased costs that would be passed on to the people. If, for example, you pay $200 a month for health insurance through your employer, and he pays $800 a month (a typical 80/20 split), your real wages are $800 a month higher than what you see on your pay stubs; it’s simply hidden from people who aren’t astute enough to see it. (And such provides you with some real tax advantages; if your employer paid you that $800 a month extra, but you had to spend it on paying all of your insurance bill, you’d show more taxable income when you filed your Form 1040.) Since Mr Frost was self-employed, under any plan which required health insurance through the employer, he’d have had to pay it all directly.²
If the Frosts would have had to have paid such directly, what about Mr Brown? He does not mention having been self-employed while trying to make it big in Hollywood, so I’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that all of his income came from being employed by others. If he had jobs which did not offer health insurance, then requiring them to offer such would increase the costs to his employers of keeping Mr Brown on the payroll. While we can’t know about Mr Brown specifically, in the aggregate increasing the costs of keeping employees to small businesses will cause some of those employers to either:
- cut jobs, because they can’t justify the employees at the higher cost;
- increase prices (which means that real people will still be paying for health care); or
- go out of business because they can’t make enough profit due to the increased costs of doing business.
What this all boils down to is responsibility. Mr Brown took decisions which were, in effect, playing the odds — and he came up snake eyes. He has accepted the responsibility for his condition and his past decisions by paying for his medical care himself. The Frosts took decisions which were playing the odds, came up snake eyes, and have become poster children for trying to push the responsibility for their decisions off on others. What the advocates of universal health care are saying, in effect, is that too many people are irresponsible, and the government has to force them to be responsible, in loco parentis as it were.
Well, I’ve finally been convinced: we do have to drop our great system of private-paid care and private insurance, and adopt a government-run, probably single-payer health care system. Our level of care will suffer, and we’ll wind up like the Canadians, who in places have to wait more than half a year, on average, for an appointment, or like the British, where the National Health Service has actually directed regional organizations to put off care, in a sort of rationing-by-time scheme.
Or perhaps we’ll wind up like the Swedes, where some malingerers get to take years off of work, at 80% pay, for “mental burnout.”
But our current system requires people to actually be responsible for themselves and their children. While Mr Brown has taken personal responsibility for his misfortune and his decisions not to purchase health insurance, I am becoming more and more convinced that he is a minority. There seem to be more people like the Frosts, who decided that other expenses were somehow more important than health care for their children, and who, when their luck runs out, expect the government to bail them out.
And bail them out we will. Even if President Bush’s veto is sustained, there are a significant number of Republicans who have deserted him on this issue — and that means they have deserted the whole idea of personal responsibility. We will not demand responsibility from people who wish to suck at the public teat, and we will not require accountability for parents like the Frosts for neglecting their children. Rather, we will have public sympathy, and dole out public money, to help them do what they were unwilling to help themselves do.
A private insurance system demands personal responsibility; it demands that the people who refuse to pay for health insurance suffer the consequences of not being treated if they get sick and don’t have the funds to pay for it themselves. But we will not demand that responsibility, and thus we are left with people like the Frosts, who were smart enough to know that if they really needed health care, they’d get it — and someone else would pay for it.
Instead, we have a system where the elderly are already all covered by Medicare, the poor are already all eligible for Medicaid, middle-class people like the Frosts can get SCHIP for their children’s health care, a drug dealer in Philadelphia who gets shot has the doctors and nurses and staff at Temple University hospital all trying to save his life, with no guarantee of payment, and those of us who are responsible, those of us who do pay for our own health insurance, have to pay more for it because health care providers charge paying patients more to make up for the losses in treating charity and Medicaid and Medicare patients.
At least, if we go to a single-payer system, people like the Frosts will have to pay something, will suffer the same increased taxes for health care that the rest of us will have to pay.³ Oh, it won’t be fair by any means; the harder people work and the more money they earn, the more they’ll have to pay. My family will wind up paying much more than the Frosts — but since the Frosts now pay nothing, well at least requiring them to pay something is an improvement.
Well, the liberals have been right all along on this one. As a conservative and a responsible husband and father, I had always thought that everyone could and should be responsible citizens, responsible for themselves and their families. The liberals were wiser than me on this: they realized just what lazy scum some people could be — easier for them, perhaps, since such are the Democratic base — and that responsible Americans would always have sympathy for the unfortunate, even if they were unfortunate due to their own poor choices, and continue to provide succor for them, rather than to hold them accountable for their bad decisions.
In loco parentis, in the place of a parent. Apparently the answer is yes, we did take them to raise!
_________________
¹ – And yes, the phrase “neglect their children” was deliberately and consciously chosen.
² – The self-employed can see this easily, as they wind up having to pay the employer-matching part of Social Security/Medicare withholding on Form 1040.
³ – And under such a system, while our taxes will certainly go up, those of us who have been responsible citizens will see our health insurance payments go away, so maybe we’ll come out, if not even, at least not abused quite so badly.
After typing a long and pain-staking comment here, I typed in the code incorrectly and lost everything attempting to return to the proper window——–THIS SUCKS!
Dana, I intend to give a considered response to your post. I just wanted you to know that this is an awesome post my friend! You have fleshed out this problem beautifully. I have always admired your posts; this one might possibly be your best!
Glad to have you on board, Dana.
Messrs Warner and Ganzeveld: I can assure you that I hate the conclusion to which I have come. Our taxes will rise, and the quality of our health care will decline.
And Rov, hopefully you are writing about this on your own fine site.
Who in America is taking responsibility for anything anymore. I’m happy to see Mr. Brown accept responsibility, but I’m thinking he is the few, not the many.
The America of my childhood ceases to exist. I miss it dearly. We were all taught to be responsible and to take care of yourself and those you are responsible for.
Our Constitution is dying. I’m afraid the World War 2 generation will have been the last to see it work properly. Now we might as well change the name of the country to the United Socialists States of North America.
Dana you misunderstood me, I agree with this statement. I have been, for quite sometime, saying that. We have de facto universal coverage now, and it works extremely poorly. MORE government involvement will only make it worse.
I believe, for instance you start first with reforming the insurance industry and make pool for adverse risk, and eliminate exclusions on pre-existing conditions. Many things may be happening in our health care system, but one is NOT a lack of insurance company profits.
The present Medicaid coverage is a DISASTER. I completely understand how a person can lose coverage due to a paperwork problem that is not their fault. It happened to me TWICE in three years. One time I was without coverage for seven months. I worked everyday to get it straighten out. I enlisted my state reps, federal congressman, both senators (even the Dem one), and governor. Hell the only entities I did not contact were Bush and God. I figured they were both too busy. My coverage was reinstated without a gap, but eight months later I still have not been reimbursed for the money we had to spend when I was showing out of force.
I would advocate doing away with the incredibly stupid Medicaid program and instead use a type of voucher that could be used to purchase private coverage. Another possibility would be to place people who qualify into the pool I talked about before for the uninsurable and require that they are covered. I guarantee that this can be done and save money over the present system.
Medicare is something I do not have as much experience with, though due to my disability I am eligible for it and I have both A & B. It rarely pays as my private insurance pays for almost everything. I will say that the payment schedules it employs are used by private insurers to limit or reduce coverage. They constantly limit coverage on durable medical equipment. The 20% deductible is onerous for many seniors also. They, of course are impossible to deal with in any kind of effective manner; think IRS and square it!
From looking on the outside before my injury (and as an former insurance agent), and from the inside as a patient/consumer my sense is that we treat health care as any other vital service our society needs, like utility companies for instance. The British nationalized the coal mines, we didn’t. We still get light and heat though don’t we? The British do too I must say. Our brand of federalism I am afraid though, would have had us poor and freezing in the dark if we nationalized energy.
Universal coverage yes, we have it already, and we should. Let us do it with mandates to the private sector. Sure there will be grumbling, but it would work. It would succeed at a lower cost and the product would improve. It would involve taking on the most powerful lobbies around, namely banking and insurance. The will still be problems to deal with; illegal immigrants for one.
We need thresholds of course to minimize fraud, but we have fraud now. People DO need to pay their way if they are able. I am sorry but concepts like stiff income qualifications and spend downs must be there. If you don’t like that, TUFF! My family has been there and had to do that.
What I fear most about government managed health care is how it would stifle what America does best: Adapt, create, and improvise. I was treated at a small, not for profit rehab hospital. This 80 bed institution has made giant strides in the treatment of SCI and TBI that have helped people the world over. These people have extremely demanding jobs, and because they work at a not for profit institution their pay is no where near what most of them could make on the “outsideâ€; but to a person almost, they love their job. From the incredibly energetic entrepreneur who has guided the ship for decades down through the ranks to cooks and housekeeping they work as a team. Believe me; the Patriots have nothing on these folks. Years of service are incredible; any organization would love their retention rate. If you put government bureaucrats over this place, you will KILL a beautiful thing and many people’s lives will be diminished.
A little detail about me to put things in context. I had my neck broken in an accident nearly three years ago witch rendered me a quadriplegic. I had health insurance; I have always had health insurance whether I could “afford†it or not. I have always had disability insurance as well. What I did not have, and please learn from me and make sure you get some, is long-term care insurance.
My medical bills to date are north of a million, the vast majority of which has been paid for by my private carrier. My family’s group policy does have a limit; in all probability I will reach it, well hopefully I will live that long. Medicaid, which due to my disability I qualify for, has paid for the home health care aids that come to my home twice a day to assist me. It pays for my copays and deductibles as well, IF the providers take it. Medicare pays for the copays my private coverage has for my medications (the copays still amount to $300-$400 a month, yes just the copays). After all this we still have tens of thousands of dollars of costs associated with my condition a year.
As I have said on this blog before, one individuals experience is not useful to illustrate the situation as a whole if you are going to pick at the specifics. I would like to say though: I was never a loafer. My wife and I made sure our family had coverage. We paid our premiums for both private and “public†insurance. Just like the rest of you, when I paid my self employment tax I paid for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. I will be dammed if I will feel guilty about using them now! We need those services; the alternative would be to have my wife do it. Fine, then she will have to quit working and we will lose our major medical and the rest of you can pay for everything! I was responsible.
There HAS to be a better way, but it is not government run health care, nor is it a single payer system. If you like the IRS and think the tax code is simple, baby you are going to just LOVE socialized medicine.
I wrote this all at once while tired. I type with one finer and a thumb and I take pain pills. So if this is unclear or has errors, well deal with it!
Dana,
What a wonderful post. I’ve linked to it at my site and then blasted Jeromy Brown for his stupidity. It’s amazing that I had already commented there giving my prayers that things improve for him! I guess I never learn. *sigh*
PG,
First, let me say that I admire your perseverance in the face of such tragedy. It truly makes the problems me and my family face look small.
I really hate the insurance industry and have for years, but really came to despise it after my husband was laid off from Big Company and couldn’t get coverage because he has had cancer. It’s scary when you realize that safety net is gone, but, as has been stated, we know that no one goes without health care in this country if they want it (in our case, it would be a trip to the county hospital). This isn’t even mentioning the $300-$400 per month we are spending on my husband’s prescriptions. It’s a good thing I don’t take any meds.
We have insurance that covers me and our children for about $300 per month. It is mainly a catastrophic plan with a high deductible, but at least it would cover something truly terrible happening. And, yes, we could find something else to do with that $300 per month, but, unlike the Frosts, we think we should take care of ourselves.
I think some sort of regulation is in order, though I don’t agree with universal care. When a pre-existing condition bars a person from getting any policy, that’s a problem government should try to solve. The answer, to me, is some regulation requiring basic coverage offered to everyone.
Sharon:
While I can fault Mr Brown’s decision to “go naked,” he took a risk, and when he crapped out, did the right thing and took responsibility for it himself. Yeah, he’s getting some help, in that the doctor is treating him at a reduced cost; that, in effect, transfers part of the cost for Mr Brown’s decision away from Mr Brown and onto the physician, but the physician chose to be charitable, and I’ll never fault charity.
What Mr Brown is apparently not doing is attempting to transfer the costs of his decision taking onto teh taxpayers; for that, I applaud him.
This is where you start to get into the notion of increased regulation of private industry by teh government, which is something that always draws close scrutiny, and a presumption against, from me.
Mr Warner wrote:
Our public assistance programs are all full of specifications and conditions and checks, to make certain that ineligible people don’t profit from the system. This is the same thing that Jesurgislac’s favorite example, Diamonte Driver, ran afoul of.
This is also where the difference between a system which demands responsibility, by holding that those who fail to be responsible suffer the consequences of not being covered for needed treatment, and one which says that everyone will be covered is. Since we will not let people who cannot pay for medical coverage die in the street, we have, as you noted, achieved universal coverage; we have eschewed demanding responsibility.
But without the requirement of responsibility, with a de facto if not de jure universal coverage system, what you have described is simply wasted time, money and effort, wasted in arguing who will pay rather than if someone will pay. Universal coverage, though I believe it will significantly worsen our health care system, could, fairly easily, eliminate the hugely wasted costs of paperwork on determining eligibility.
Such a system could require a national identity card.
If you don’t mind my asking: how did this happen? One can always learn from others’ misfortunes (this is very common in the aviation world) about how to avoid a potentially dangerous situation. I wrote in a private e-mail group a few months ago how a bike helmet saved my noggin from a nasty bump when my bike hit a rut in a trail and I went ass over teakettle over the handlebars.
I don’t mind at all. It was an auto accident. My SUV rolled over on its top and the roof crushed on the driver’s side. My younger son was with me and he rolled the window down and got out unharmed, my condition was a little more severe. I was only going 25mph at the time of the accident. It was on a mountain pass here in Colorado and the conditions were icy. I was sober, and we were wearing our seatbelts.
I was blessed though; I don’t know how I could have faced life if mine and my son’s situations were reversed. Also, the accident miraculously happened in site of the police and paramedics. That was wonderful as I was not breathing and had no pulse when the got there.
I was also blessed when I came across you guys. Since my injury it has not been possible for me to read a book. After reading a few pages it becomes painful. Reading on the computer is much easier. I had very little experience with blogs until I happened to come across a Red State post Dana had made regarding the Supreme Court. That linked to here and I made one of my first blog comments here.
I liked the tone here; it is much different than most blogs, so I kept coming back. It was and still is very difficult to type, and it is very time consuming, but it has gotten much better. I have to take quite a bit of medications and my fatigue factor is high, so reading and concentration was difficult. But because I wanted to engage you guys (that even includes J and Phooey) I forced myself to focus. Because of our give and take my mental acuity has improved quite a bit. I am not where I was before my injury mentally, I accept that as an adjustment that has been asked of me, but I have gained so much from this. I still battle with aphasia, and that is an additional challenge when it comes to sounding coherent. It also is maddening when it comes to proof reading, my mind does not process the written word as it is. It fills in gaps and takes short cuts.
Common Sense led me to ConClub and I started posting there and seem to have found a home. So when I say that you guys have made a difference in my life I mean it. I have expressed these feelings to Dana in emails before, and now I am telling all of you: Thank You.
You own a car, you insure to keep it on the road and registered and protected. You own a house, you insure it and the contents to be protected. It seems ludicrous to do other wise. People are willing, and slightly coerced by denial of privileges or lawsuits to carry these insurances. But these are objects. But as sure as you don’t believe you will have an accident or a fire, you bet on the one irreplaceable object, you, that you won’t get seriously ill. Funny how we will insure objects, but figure your health is someone else’s concern to take the responsibility for it.
As I noted on Mr Brown’s fine site:
Yorkshire wrote:
Well, that’s kind of the point. In Pennsylvania (where both York and I live), if you let the insurance lapse on your car, the insurance company is obligate to report it to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and if you do not come forth immediately with proof of insurance from another company, your plates are suspended; you can no longer drive the vehicle. Most states have similar clubs.
Most mortgage companies require you to carry insurance on your property, because your property serves as the collateral for the loan.
But health insurance has no watchdog, no government agency standing over you, making sure that you carry insurance or penalizing you if you do not.
This was the difference that I was, admittedly, slow to come to understand. We provided universal health care coverage, in that we don’t let people die in the street for the lack of insurance, but we have no mechanism by which to force adults to accept their responsibilities as adults, and buy health insurance.
Thus we had supposed adults like the Frosts, people who could have bought health insurance though things would have been much tighter for them, acting irresponsibly, and then when something bad happens, expecting the government to take care of them.
I suspect that they are loyal democrats.
Dana said…
That is very true. There better be income restrictions and accountability. There must be qualifications. We will still take it in the shorts though. I would think if we clean up and streamline the process by getting the government out of it as much as possible it will save billions.
Keep in mind that you can always find auto insurance in Pennsylvania. Health insurance is different. You would go along way by pooling all risks and removing exclusions, and FORCE the insurance company to put all policyholders into groups. Those changes alone would solve the difficulties Sharon has encountered. In the end comparing health insurance to forms of property and casualty insurance is specious.
You guy make the assumption that all people could not be covered without a drastic cost increase. Why? We are already covering them very inefficiently now. The insurance companies are not folding now; hell they are thriving.
Force the private carriers in, kick the government out. If done right, you will save money. Look at Pennsylvania’s Medicaid budget; don’t you think there are already enough funds?
BTW, Hillary would force everyone to carry insurance.
Well, Mr Warner, it seems to me that if we are going to have universal health care coverage, it’s just easier to have the government as a single payer, with everyone here legally being eligible for coverage.
I’m covered under my wife’s health insurance; it’s cheaper for us to do it that way. And while there is never a question about her coverage, if a bill is submitted for an expense related to me, they always inquire first if I have coverage on my own; if I had, they’d deny the claim and require my coverage to pay it.
That’s understandable: insurance companies try to reduce costs paid out. And any system which uses private companies will continue such things.
Private insurance exists not to cover us, but to make a profit. We all know that under a universal care system, the government would try to squeeze out that profit, to reduce costs.
Finally, I do not see how a system which uses private insurance could compel coverage; only the government has the power to levy a tax, and the premiums would have to be a tax to prevent situations like the Frosts.
PG is right that there’s always home owner’s insurance or car insurance. Sure, you don’t plan to have a wreck or for your house to burn down, but if and when you rebuild, you can get new insurance.
The same is not true of health insurance, Dana, as I sadly know. We had decent insurance through my husband’s employer, but when he was laid off, COBRA cost 1/3 of our monthly income. That’s not even a matter of us “not planning” for trouble. That’s giving a family a prohibitive new expense on top of regular budgeted items.
It’s also a far cry from the Frosts situation, where they could have gotten insurance long before the unfortunate accident. It’s understandable to me that they can’t get insurance now that they need it. Insurance is just a ponzi scheme anyway. But if we finally admit that we, as a society, consider health care to be a right, then we will figure out regulations to force insurance companies to cover people even when they aren’t perfect.
But health insurance has no watchdog, no government agency standing over you, making sure that you carry insurance or penalizing you if you do not.
Isn’t that what Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts and one of Hillary Clinton’s ideas?
As I understand New Jersey, anyone can get health covered even with pre-existings, but I understand it’s twice as expensive.
Sharon: Just a note…on a human level, I don’t think anybody here wishes anybody else physical harm. We’re all hoping for the best for your husband as well, and long for the day when he can get coverage. There’s literally nothing you can say to make us change that sentiment. I can appreciate your good wishes that I not fall over dead, but if I get you mad enough to start wishing me dead, it’ll have more effect on you than it will me.
[...] Last week, I concluded, very reluctantly, that we’d have to go to universal health care coverage, because our society has decided to be responsible for people who won’t be responsible for themselves. And now comes a story out of my mother’s home state of Maine, where the local school board has decided that it is better at parenting than parents: Birth Control Allowed at Maine Middle School By Joel Elliott, The New York Times [...]
[...] Unfortunately, I’ve become persuaded that universal health care is a very bad idea whose time has come. (Shameless blog plug alert!] [...]
[...] I (very reluctantly) changed my mind and decided that single-payer universal health care coverage is the only course reasonably left for our great nation. It isn’t that I think that such would be better, but that we already have universal health care coverage — just in a very bastardized form. [...]
[...] I have come to the very reluctant conclusion (<a href=”http://commonsensepoliticalthought.com/?p=2026″here and (<a href=”http://commonsensepoliticalthought.com/?p=2067″here) that we will have to go to a single payer universal health care system, but it’s still an enormously bad idea. [...]
[...] Actually, J, I (very reluctantly) changed my mind, and concluded that the US should go to a single payer universal health care system. However, I don’t believe that single payer will bring good health care to the US; I think that it will decrease the quality of health care in the United States, just as your own fine country is seeing an exodus of “health tourists,” about 70,000 of them a year, because the British single-payer system is so crappy. [...]
[...] (A much longer explanation of my reasoning is here.) [...]
[...] As y’all know, I changed my mind about universal health care coverage, not because I think it’s a good idea (I don’t), but because we already have it, in that we don’t deny health care to anyone just because he cannot pay. [...]
[...] Indeed, that is the onjly reason I changed my mind and decided to support a single-payer system: because a system which ought to rely on market discipline — if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it — is something we don’t employ when it comes to health care, because we simply will not allow people who can’t afford, or could afford but chose not to buy, health insurance to die in the street. In effect, we already have the Obama plan in operation: universal care, without any compulsion to pay for it. [...]
[...] As my eight readers know, I very reluctantly came to the conclusion that we’d have to go to a single-payer universal health care system, but I have also noted that such will not improve our health care system at all — and it certainly wouldn’t be free! [...]
[...] othet socialized medicine countries. Posted in Solutions from the Left, Health care | Trackback | del.icio.us | Top OfPage [...]
[...] As y’all know, I have said that I support going to a single-payer health care plan. But I have never said that we’d get better health care out of it, and actually expect our health care system to get worse under such a system. [...]
[...] point, I believe that we would survive a conversion to socialized medicine, and have, in fact, said we should go that way. But I don’t think it will make our health care system any better, and will, in fact, make it [...]
[...] I happen to disagree with Mr Martin on the idea of universal health care coverage. As much as I loathe the idea of the government managing health care or health care payments, the [...]