Repost from two years ago:
I'm going to go off my usual topic and get political this morning. Turn away if that offends you.
I've been reading a lot of comments about the health care bill and why it's unconstitutional (I don't know about that--- a lot of things our government does could be considered unconstitutional but folks, I'm not a lawyer. I honestly don't know. I will leave that to the lawyers.) I'm going to offer my opinion as to why universal health care is needed.
I work in an insurance office for an independent agent. I don't sell health insurance because I'm only licensed for personal lines (as a CSR). I have noticed a few things about car insurance customers over the last three years.
1. A good portion of them don't understand why it is illegal for them to drive without car insurance.
2. The same portion are the people who couldn't afford to pay for the damage they did with said car to someone else's vehicle. They don't seem to have made the connection between the car being a rolling bomb (think about that tank of gasoline) and the fact that they take other people's lives into their hands every time they get into it.
3. If it wasn't illegal for them not to have car insurance, they wouldn't have it.
So why is it illegal to drive without car insurance? Since cars have been on the road people have been crashing them. Since Henry Ford invented the assembly line, you haven't had to be wealthy enough to pay for what you did to other people's property to own one. The states all noticed that this was a huge problem. People driving around tearing up other people's cars and injuring them and then not paying for it. So they decided to force people to carry insurance. If you wreck, you pay more for insurance because chances are you're going to be a repeat offender on that line. All those people who don't wreck? The money they pay into the system helps the insurance company pay for all those people who can't drive. Why do they have to pay too? Because even the safest driver on God's earth screws up once in a while. It's just that way.
In Oklahoma anyway, even if you are the worst driver ever, the most destructive weirdo in the whole state, DUIs, at-fault-accidents, speeding tickets, someone has to take you. It's called a high risk pool. The state takes these fools and assigns them to insurance companies. They may have to pay an arm, a leg, and their firstborn for it but someone has to give them car insurance. The same is true for house insurance. Up until this year, the same was NOT true for health insurance.
I know you don't have to own a car, so you don't have to buy car insurance. I know you don't have to have house insurance either. You should, but you don't have to. The difference with health insurance is that unless you die young everyone is going to get old. Everyone is going to sick. If you're uninsured and you get in a car accident, the ambulance is going to haul you to the ER and they are going to treat you and if you can't pay--they aren't going to get paid. If you don't have health insurance and you get cancer, you will get minimal treatment and you will probably die. Why? Because as much as the hospital would like to think otherwise on occasion, they're a business. A business must get paid for the services they provide to stay open. Who pays for the treatment the uninsured receive?
Everybody. You do. I do. We all do. Walgreens, for example, billed my insurance company for $271.07 for my medicine last month. Do you want to guess how much they got? $18.16. If I had been paying for the medicine out of pocket, I would have given them $250.00 more. The difference? The insurance company has a contract with the pharmacy. If the doctor or the pharmacy isn't guaranteed their money, they're going to charge more---which helps pay for all those folks who don't pay. The doctor's visit? They billed $150.00. How much did they get? Including my copay, $94.70. Once again, if I were a responsible uninsured person, paying that difference would help make up for some other person who wasn't able to pay their bill.
People don't want health insurance when they're healthy. They only want it when they're sick. They want to wait until there's something that costs more than the coverage to get it. This is why that word "pre-existing condition" keeps coming up. On a car, no one pays for damage that was there before the policy was in place. That's common sense. It's common sense with health insurance too except for one little hiccup. People die from pre-existing conditions. I don't care how much you love your car, you're not going to die because of a dent in the bumper. If I come down with diabetes, it's only fair to ask the insurance company to pay for it if I was paying premiums all those years when I didn't need treatment. Right?
You know it is whether you like it or not. We all want to be able to get health insurance whether we're sick or not. The only way that's going to be fair to the insurance companies (who didn't want to take me two years ago on an individual plan because I'm too fat---nothing else wrong with me, mind you, and now I have medical proof that I'm a healthy fat person) to have to take everyone is if all these people who refused to take out coverage until they're sick are 'encouraged' to do the right thing and pay premiums while they're healthy. Otherwise, there won't be a health insurance industry to reform, because they'll go broke paying for all those people who won't pay for anything until they already have the medical equivalent of a house fire smoldering.
We've been requiring it for cars for years. Now it's time to start requiring it for bodies. We all have one. We'll be grateful when the decline in preventable diseases starts lowering over all costs.
Edit: Today the Supreme Court decided that the health care mandate is legal because the penalty is a tax. I can see that. Oh, and if you're wondering, I LOVE broccoli and the government doesn't have to force me to eat it. And my old car??? It's fuel efficient enough it wouldn't have qualified for cash for clunkers, so the petrol police wouldn't come after me anyway. I am an adult. I live in a society. I must do my part.
I think your years of experience in the insurance industry have really helped you be able to explain the health insurance reform bill that has been passed recently. We all have bodies, we should all have our "health" insured. I have health insurance through my work. And with the new law nothing changes, except that maybe a few years from now the cost will go down for the company I work for which means my individual payments will go down a bit (which means more money in my own pocket).
ReplyDeleteWhen I hear people talk about it as if it is for the poorest people on the planet, it isn't. All US States receive money from the Federal Government for their Medicaid programs (which in OK is called SoonerCare). That's the health insurance for the poorest people. This bill helps all those people who A) don't qualify for Medicaid because of their income d B) don't get insurance through their work. It gives folks who do work hard for a living every day the chance to get the health insurance they can't get elsewhere. They don't qualify for Medicaid, they don't get it through their work (their job doesn't offer it...which there are still lots of small businesses that don't because they can't afford to). This law will help small businesses be able to offer health insurance (which makes them for competitive), it helps lower the costs that large companies pay (which makes them more competitive globally), and it lets individuals who up until now couldn't afford insurance but couldn't get it through their employer or through Medicaid actually get covered. We're not talking about welfare, we're not talking about people living in government housing. We're talking about middle class families who all too often can't afford health insurance. What I find strange is that in some cases, it is these very people who seem to be against this law. It will not only require you to have health insurance, but it is now going to make it affordable through several steps in the law that help people get insurance at an affordable rate. The poorest of the poor aren't complaining about the law, even though it doesn't really effect them. They're covered by Medicaid and they know the kind of good treatment they still get and the choices in doctors, etc they still get to make. They don't understand what the fuss is about. The wealthy are complaining that its more welfare (when it isn't really) and the middle class that it is meant to help the most are complaining its unconstitutional. Sometimes we live in such an odd nation. The people that complain about all the problems and how government should solve them and then the government comes up with a solution and they're against it. Sometimes I think people just like to complain and don't really want any solutions to the problems.
While i agree that it is right for everyone to have access to health care, i still do not believe it is right. Besides car insurance being optional (you don't have to have a car)- the other difference between the trio yours of insurance is that car insurance is not just to cover your car but the possibility of damaging or hurting someone else from direct harm. Aca isn't about protecting other people harm, but an act of legislation that tells people what is best for them. Any person who can think for themselves knows what is best for them and don't need laws like this. I am an adult too. But i don't my part. I don't pay into the system via taxes. Why? Because i am under the poverty level and will have to go on medicaid. I rather not. I rather have a system where i pay into something
ReplyDeleteIf you work you pay pay roll taxes and medicare/medicaid taxes. You are also welcome to buy private insurance if you want to. Actually, the penalty is a TAX, which no one will got to jail for not paying, and it was intentionally set up that way to make it less of a burden. If you break you arm, Alli, you will seek medical treatment for it. You are not going to, and no one would expect you to, have your arm rot off from gangrene because you can't pay the doctor bill. If you don't take the services offered to you, your doctor will likely get stiffed on the bill if you are unable to pay for it. That's your doctor getting hurt. The reason everything costs so much in health care is that a lot of people can't pay their bills because they don't have insurance and the hospitals end up having to make up the money somewhere else. That's hurting the public at large.
DeleteOh and I should point out that all health care premium money, if paid via payroll deduction is tax free. This means that we're all subsidizing Rush Limbaugh's viagra (and prescription pain killers he's hooked on too) by the tax break we're giving him on that cushy health insurance plan he has. I'd rather pay medicare taxes to subsidize someone else's medicaid than know I had a part in that... but no one's asking me.