Under the new health care mandates, which are now effectively "the law", if you don't have health insurance, you will be fined according to a sliding scale that reaches a maximum of something like $1500 per year. This seems to be at the crux of many objections to the new system: What gives them - the government - the right?!?!?! Right? Here is your answer: There is an implicit contract between you and the government in which you demand that emergency and extended medical treatment be made available if you are sick or seriously injured. If you or someone else calls 911 for help, you expect someone to show up. If you are taken to a hospital, you expect treatment. And you don't expect to be tossed into the street if your credit card is refused. So, the only justification that I can see for an exemption to the insurance mandate is if emergency services, hospitals, and doctors, are given the right to refuse treatment. If your credit card bounces or your credit rating isn't good, instead of treatment, you are completely on your own. If that means that you are left to die on the highway after an auto accident, then that is your choice. The street cleaning crews can retrieves the bodies for the sake of public health and safety. Do we have any takers or do we as a civilized society reject this option?
I remember when, in the USA, the National Speed limit was lowered to 55 mph. This was around the time of the fuel crisis. What law enforcment found themselves dealing with was a problem of, "What was ok yesterday (70mph) is not ok today." This is what happens when a policy changes into something people are totally unaccustomed to. No one was ever fined for not having health insurance BEFORE... why suddenly now? Which is ironic considering that the next question is, "How is Obama going to pay for this health care overhaul?" Welp- Problem Solved!
That is true. Most people tend to resist change. People made quite a fuss over the civil rights act as well. In fact, when he signed the bill, Johnson correctly predicted that this would cost the Democrats the South, for the lives of everyone in the room. Back in the 1980s, I worked in the medical field when hospitals did begin to refuse patients for lack of insurance. Since that was considered to be unacceptable, it is no longer legal to do so. Nonetheless, the bills for the uninsured must be paid by someone. Until now that was you and me. Not at all. This program seeks to reduce the deficit by a little over a trillion dollars over the next twenty years. There are a number of strategies employed in order to accomplish this. They include taxes on those who refuse to participate and are not otherwise exempt from the insurance mandate; taxes on cadillac plans; cost shifting from medicare; a mandate that the insurance companies disperse 80% of the revenues collected, for claims; penalties for employers who don't provide health insurance for their employees, and no doubt many other methods. Yes, somehow we must pay for this. That is unavoidable. In fact, we are paying for it now every time someone who is uninsured shows up at an Emergency Room, for a cold, at ten times the cost of a doctor's visit. The Obama plan seeks to restructure the system to reduce costs and to distribute the current, real cost of health care, intelligently.
In answer to your question NO. I have never been without health insurance ever. And most people in this country have healthcare insurance. Health insurance is just something any responsible person would buy if it were within their ability to do so. So the requirement to make everyone buy healthcare insurance is no big deal to me. Under the present system, there are those who decide to buy a large screen TV or a vacation instead of buying healthcare insurance and those people are being financially irresponsible. If they get ill or have an accident, I will be paying the cost of their treatment. I believe the current estimate is that each insured is currently paying over a thousand dollars a year for medical treatment for the uninsured. And that figure will rise if the healthcare reform passed recently did not go into effect.
We make everyone pay for healthcare, even people who will have trouble paying for rent and food after the extra insurance premiums are paid. Problem solved. Sucks to be a low wage worker.
I as an American like having the capacity to call 911 and have an ambulance carry me to an operating room to perform a $100,000 operation on me regardless of whether I have $100,000 or not- this is something I value as an American- I take it as a right, being a first world nation and all. Socialized healthcare is the price WE ALL pay for this privlidge.
Under the new healthcare law, everyone pays according to their ability...radical concept eh. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
This is the crux of the dog biscuit IMHO. We are already paying through the nose for this type of care and it could be done much more cost - effectively. The health care bill attempts just that.
Making everyone pay the bill of a few freeloaders seems unfair to me. If someone defaults on their mortgage should you be taxed to make it up? After all, "we're all in this together."
And you lost me as soon as you dismissed everyone who can't afford insurance as "freeloaders." The last time I was being called a "freeloader," it was by the unemployed girlfriend of a room-mate who wasn't able to come up with his half of the rent. At the time, she was physically assaulting me because I refused to drop out of college and get a full-time job to pay for them to live there as freeloaders at my expense. Irony of ironies, huh? Quite frankly, I think anyone who uses terms like "freeloader" or "loser" or anything along those lines doesn't really deserve any part in my sympathies. They are usually jerks. I think there should be a special "jerk tax" where we force everyone who insists on being a straight-up ass to their fellow man to pay for all of the services and needs of the government, so the rest of us won't have to. I don't see why I should pay for the government when it is jolly well possible to take it out of the pockets of people I would love to see dicked-over anyway.
Well that is the current state of affairs. If you buy healthcare services the cost of treating the uninsured is burried into the healthcare bill you pay. With healthcare reform, the uninsured are at least paying what they can afford.
