My Stance on Healthcare

Longtime lurker Cheddar (and you're welcome to lurk, I encourage it!), an always good questioner of my rants, asked on this post:

Would health care be so bad if it were provided to only citizens and immigrants (please don't confuse immigrants with aliens).

The short answer is "yes", because we *still* can't afford it.

This isn't about "pre-existing conditions". There are two issues with that:

1. If you as a person were able to get a tax deduction for paying your own healthcare, we wouldn't have the problem where you lose your coverage every time you changed jobs. The Government and its regulations CREATED pre-existing condition issues by only allowing businesses to receive credits for insuring employees' health.


2. You can't wreck your car, and call Allstate the next day and demand insurance can you? Why not? Because the premiums you DID NOT pay over the last 5 years CAN NOT ensure that Allstate can afford your coverage. You understand that what this idiotic law has done is ring the death knell for private health insurance? No one can be profitable in that situation - not without tripling, quadrupling, or MORE the premiums of anyone stupid enough to continue paying for healthcare.

This isn't about who gets it. Ultimately (and Mark Levin has proved a number of times), we're talking about less than 20mil people that "need" healthcare - the rest are foreigners, wealthy folks (making more than $75k a year) that choose not to carry coverage, and also younger folks who are generally healthy and don't feel they need insurance.

This IS about NOT reforming medical tort laws, where Doctors must still pay exorbitant amounts of money to cover frivolous malpractice lawsuits, and order all manner of extra and unnecessary tests to try and prevent same, increasing the costs to insurance companies.

This IS about a Nation that somehow believes that they deserve the latest, most expensive treatment that has a low success rate, even if they can't afford it. I'm sorry, but if you can't pay for a plan that can cover it, you don't deserve the latest in whizbang tests and surgeries.

This IS about not having to wait four or more months for cancer tests, MRIs, etc. This IS about not having to ration care because people overuse the system since...after all, it's free!
This IS about not losing many of your Doctors because, shock, they don't feel like putting up many thousands of dollars only to be told they make too much and should work for peanuts.

Here is basic human behavior as I channel Joe and Jane Everyman:

If my choice (after my company drops my insurance plan because the premiums just doubled - and THEY ALREADY ARE DOUBLING), is to pay $1k a month (or more!) for health insurance (and I have always kept myself covered up until now), or to save $12k up (12 months, $1k saved per month by not enrolling in Obamacare), pay the fine for not having coverage at the end of the year ($2k), and if anything happens in the mean time, fuck it, I'll go DEMAND coverage since they can't turn me down for pre-existing conditions, what do you think I (and 99.5% of the rest of the country) is going to go do?

And when we all drop our plans (after our employers drop them as well), and start showing up demanding coverage all of a sudden when we get cancer, break something, have a heart attack, etc, what's going to happen to Insurance Companies - right, out of business. That'll just leave Uncle Sam to take care of it. Just like they took care of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the Post Office, etc. etc. etc.

Please read the articles I've linked. They're not about politics, they're about simple economics, human behavior, and basic math.

Healthcare as it stood before this bill was DEFINITELY broken - no one disputes that. What this new law has done, though, is put Government in charge of the broken system because somehow (and they NEVER EVER EVER EVER HAVE IN THE PAST), they're going to lower costs, increase coverage, and improve services.

That'll be the day.