One Long Monday Night in the Greatest Healthcare System on Earth

[oldernwiser]

31. I hate to say this

But, Romney is right - for the wrong reason.

First of all, people tend to forget that insurance isn't free money. It gets funded from a pool of contributors, and the healthier they are the more funding the pool gets. If people wait until they REALLY need medical attention before they subscribe to a plan then what you end up with is negative cash flow into the pool. It's unfortunate that the healthiest among us feel that since they're never sick and live a healthy lifestyle that there's no reason for them to "waste" their money on insurance.

The national healthcare act is, in my opinion, a time bomb. Essentially, it says that everyone gets accepted into a health plan regardless of ongoing issues. It will force private insurers to accept not just a risk but the CERTAINTY of paying out more money than they currently take in which will raise premiums across the board. Those unable to afford the private insurers rates will be able to get a government sponsored policy, so if the healthiest of us are enrolled privately then the government will take on the negative cash flow issue which will result in much higher taxes across the board - the working middle class being hardest hit without regard to where they're insured.

Our current hospital regulations say that public hospitals must accept patients regardless of their ability to pay. This is a good thing - it keeps poorer people from needlessly dying. But, if a hospital takes in 5 people who can't pay and 1 who can, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the 1 who can pay, pays for the 5 who can't. This is why the cost of health care keeps spiraling upward, especially when the economy slows down and people are out of work: 5 people become 10 or 15 or 50. We all carry that economic burden whether we're insured or not. Insurance companies have to cap their payouts to keep hospitals from hitting them with inflated costs, but since the amount they pay is negotiated annually, even THAT figure goes up over time.

The point of the OP was to say that we need to do something about the uninsured problem, but the real issue is how to keep medical costs from skyrocketing until we have to be one of the 1% to get our injuries fixed. If we are going to accept having to pay for those who can't pay for themselves, then maybe we really ought to scrap insurance altogether and fully nationalize our healthcare industry - that would mean contributing to a medical pool in the form of direct taxation. Since we're paying for it already every time we see a doctor or visit a hospital, the costs might as well be fairly distributed.

The GOP position on this issue is just plain wrong as well. They figure that it's unfair to expect those who work to have to pay for those who don't in the form of taxes. The thing is, if we only pay when we need treatment then we can expect to have to pay $5000 for a single nebulizer treatment and a prescription at our local hospitals. And the more people who can't pay will most certainly make $5000 a bargain in a few years. The GOP's staunch refusal to even consider nationalization guarantees that more public hospitals will close - further increasing wait times, driving the most qualified doctors into private hospitals and killing our healthcare as we know it.

Obama was on the right track, but his legislation doesn't go far enough - it treats insurance as the problem instead of taking on the way we apportion healthcare and it's costs.