Quote of the day

What free care? Have you been to an emergency room lately and seen it clogged with people who have no health insurance coverage sitting there waiting for free treatment because by law they cannot be refused? Do you not fundamentally understand the nature of the Health care crisis in America?

Here’s the idea in a nutshell. The government pickups the full tab for all the uninsured now. Because they have no coverage, the go to emergency rooms (expensive) for routine care that could handled better and cheaper by a General Practitioner in his office (much less expensive). They also tend to let problems linger longer because of the inability to go to a doctor’s office so they wind up with worse conditions costing more money and time to treat in the ER.

The idea is, make it similar to Auto insurance by forcing everyone to be covered by some private plan. Those not covered by their employers and cannot afford the premiums are put into a group and buy insurance as a group (which is much cheaper) and have their premiums subsidized according to their financial ability to pay. In the end, costs come down and the government (the taxpayers) save money. Will it work? We’ll see. It just started.

TheBigOldDog on January 13, 2008 at 12:28 AM

Sorry, but I still don’t buy it. I’ve read many more stories of people having to declare bankruptcy because they got blindsided by an accident or an illness when they did not have any insurance, or what insurance they did have wasn’t enough to cover their medical expenses. Even Christopher Reeve was an advocate for insurance reform because of what happened to him.

I see two problems here: people have come to expect free or low-cost health care, and the health care industry itself has done a great job of promoting “preventative care”. So anyone with a sore throat ends up in an emergency room. Heaven forbid anyone should take a couple of aspirin and suffer with the everyday aches and pains that come with living.

I’m sitting here right now in front of my computer and I have such bad lower back pain that I can barely walk. But that happens to me sometimes. I’ll get over it. I always do.

The auto insurance analogy isn’t valid because mandatory liability insurance protects us all. Driving is a privilege, not a right, so requiring auto insurance is not the same thing mandatory health insurance. Whether or not we pay for the uninsured through higher taxes or higher premiums, the result is the same. We still pay. The difference is the government now tells people what to do.

A better analogy to auto insurance/health insurance would be using a road service like AAA. I paid for AAA for 10 years and never needed it. It was $50 a year. Well, one day I did need it. It was 2 degrees and my car wouldn’t start. So I called AAA. They told me they could be there in about 4 hours. Nice. Of course it would take them four hours. It was 2 degrees out and a lot of peoples cars wouldn’t start that morning.

So I didn’t renew my AAA membership. It was 15 more years before I needed road service again. So, since I owned a Ford, I called Ford’s Road Service. My free road service with them had expired years before. To come out and jump my dead battery they would charge me $100. I paid it.

I hear that AAA charges $75 now. Should I be forced to pay them $75 a year for something I may not need for 10 years and will cost me $150 when I do?

Jaynie59 on January 13, 2008 at 1:20 AM