One of the most intellectually dishonest claims about healthcare reform is the premise that we're trying to "help" 47 million people who can't afford insurance. These people are all somehow "shut out," and the goal is to get them covered.
In fact, many young healthy people are simply opting not to purchase insurance. This is not surprising, when you consider their options. Purchasing healthcare through an employer requires them to assume the cost of less-healthy co-workers. Purchasing outside of work requires them to pay income taxes on their premiums.
And an array of state and federal laws regulating health insurance make it impossible to purchase the one thing young people really need -- actual insurance for catastrophic illness. Instead, available insurance plans are all required to cover office visits, pregnancy and other expenses that not every young person might need.
In fact, most of the regulatory burden in health insurance appears to center around forcing insureds to share parts of other people's expenses. So, in a sense, people who decide not to purchase insurance because the cost seems disproportionate to their personal risk are, well, correct. What they're rejecting is not health insurance at all; they're rejecting socialized medicine.
Jim Angle, from Fox News:
That means older people will pay less but young people will pay more.
"If you limit the amount premiums can vary based on a person's age, that can result in premiums increasing by 50 or 60 percent for workers under the age of 30," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans.
In fact, a study by the Urban Institute found that going to a 2-1 age rating would push up premium costs for the youngest adults by almost $1,100 to just under $3,000 dollars a year.
Many young people won't buy insurance at current rates, much less higher ones.
The article observes that in some states young people pay one sixth or one seventh of the premium that older people pay. If you take a group of healthy young people and follow them over time, it's not unreasonable to believe that, even after allowing for the few who go on to become very sick, they're only going to consume a fraction of the total care that a similar-sized group of seniors will consume.
So why, then, is Congress looking to stick this group with fully 1/2 to 1/3 of the premiums paid by older people? Because this demographic is so incredibly healthy that nearly all of that money can be used to cover sicker people.
We've talked about how there are two kinds of liberals -- the "useful idiots" who generally mean well but who don't understand the true costs of the policies they support, and the elites whose agenda is really served by those policies. The elites are the ones who know that Obamacare is designed around rationing.
Similarly, there are two ways liberals can look at the 47 million "uninsured." Your basic, garden variety, well-meaning bleeding-heart liberal idiot feels sorry for 47 million hapless souls who are all one broken bone away from homelessness.
But the elites -- when they look at that 47 million they look past the temporarily unemployed/uninsured, past the pre-existing conditions, past the seniors caught in the Medicare donut-hole and the rescissions. What they see, in that 47 million, is the 15 million or so who have escaped all the hidden socialism. Where the useful idiots see that not everyone has insurance, the elites see that not everyone is paying.
But why the public option? If liberals just wanted to write checks to cover the uninsured, they could do that for less than the cost of Cap and Trade, the TARP bailout, or the last "stimulus." And it wouldn't take 2000 pages of legislation to do it. But it also wouldn't impose a permanent tax on being young and healthy. That's the one feature unique to the public option, and it's everything in this debate.
What's more, the fact that this could be done for less than the advertised cost of the public option tells you that the public option will also do it for less than its advertised cost. Universal healthcare will be run on a shoestring, and you can bet that a big chunk of the proverbial one-seventh of the economy will end up getting spent on a lot of completely unrelated crap. But don't worry -- there'll be a lockbox for the IOUs.
Just how many people are the libs trying to shoulder this on? That's hard to tell. It kind of depends on what your definition of "afford" is. Obviously everyone who can afford insurance but isn't buying it. Then there are those who say they can't afford it because they want to afford, say, a home or a car. Or the folks who think they can afford luxuries like "tuition." All of these deadbeats are going to find that they suddenly can afford healthcare.
In the new America, it's gonna be all that other stuff that they can't afford.
That's the John Galt Line.
All of these big costly government programs are sold as something to help people, when the reality is that they are tools to create more debt.
Why?
Because debt is the engine of our monitary system. Without it there is no money. And there is never enough money in circulation to service all of the outstanding pricipal AND interest on exiting debt.
We are doomed to live in a world of exponentially increasing debt under our current monetary scheme.
Posted by: CactusClef | 12/23/2010 at 05:41 PM
As an American I for one refuse to pay to keep other people healthy. The moment this bill is laid on my doorstep is the moment I reach for my shotgun!
Posted by: Johnny G. | 05/28/2011 at 09:07 PM