Our healthcare system is pretty munged up. It's costs have skyrocketed far beyond inflation, and now consumes huge chunks of responsible families income. It is and was pretty unsustainable.
Insurance was one of the many factors that cause it to be so.
So now we have mandatory insurance for everyone.
Certain kinds of expenditures we like... buying cars, televisions, food... things that give us joy. Other kinds of expenditures piss us off. Replacing a failed septic system. Automobile mechanics. Health Care. Stuff that occurs when it is not convenient, to just get us back to a starting point. I think this is a human condition.
Without making insurance mandatory, and remember, this whole debate was not about access to health care, it was access to health insurance, young, healthy people would still not pay to be part of it. In fact, in a perfectly efficient market, we wouldn't get insurance until we needed health care.
Insurance only works when enough people that don't need it right now pay into the system. It is because of this fact that insurance companies have lobbied states and feds for years to make various insurance mandatory. Vehicles. Home (as long as you have a mortgage). Now Health.
Insurance owns America. Once again, big business uses government to make rules to force people to buy things that they don't choose to buy on their own. In this case, because it is one of those non-enjoyable purchases, and it is, arguably, for the collective benefit, it gets through. Now lets work on septic systems. Or not. I just bought one, and I won't need another for 20 years. But last year, I would have been all over it. Especially if I couldn't be denied coverage for having a irreparably munged septic system.
Oh well. The biggest problem I had with the legislation that passed is the same I have with EVERY piece of legislation passed by EITHER party. It is written by special interests and then edited by chimpanzees and then amended by pork barrel specialists and then becomes "The Business Plan of How We Do Something". Unlike a regular business plan, you can't adjust as you go along, fixing the operating problems with bad original assumptions so that you can create an efficient working model. Your only recourse is to throw more money at it if it doesn't work as planned, and you can rest assured , it won't. How do I know? Because NO PROGRAM , in history, instituted by Congress with heavy hands on control, HAS EVER WORKED as advertised. They have all evolved into monstrosities unrecognizable to their architects. Cancers fed with the nutrients of ever expanding piles of Vitamin Cash.
The best laws are ones that say "everyone is created equal" or some such, and the only agencies that deal with it are courts. No overhead laws. Of course, that's just my opinion.
I had a great program for Health Care Reform. We just enslave the Doctors, Nurses, and Pharma folks. Since we were choosing to go down the road of taking from some without their desire or recourse, why not take exclusively from the providers? Isn't that some sort of equivalency?
Wouldn't it be cool if everyone who worked paid income tax at some level? Make us ALL stakeholders in society? Since we essentially confiscate some percentage of the remuneration of 50% of working Americans without, necessarily, their permission, does this mean that I am 40% slave and 60% free person? We seem to agree that 100% slave is bad. At which percentage of our labor is it considered Slavery? Indentured Servitude? Is there a magic line?
Just wondering this Easter Morning, as my dog found all the real Easter Eggs while the kids focused on the ones with candy and money...
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