Personally, I made jerking-off motions when I read the news, and then got back to the business of actually living a healthy, preventative lifestyle (such as riding PAST the Burger King on my bicycle), but there are a million different arguments being shouted all across the country today, over airwaves and dinner tables, and a friend's astute comments (while I disagreed with them) brought an issue to mind, the health insurance mandate: that insurance coverage must be required.
While at first this must seem like a gift to the providers and further proof of President Obama's "socialist agenda", it actually makes perfect sense. Although unconstitutional at the federal level (and will be overturned), it's perfectly legal state-by-state, and just such a mandate is perfectly accepted elsewhere at the state level in the insurance industry.
Auto insurance is mandated in many states because un- and under insured drivers are the reason for high premiums of many reputable companies. Those assholes just pass the costs onto everybody else.
In fact, the Right-ish stance on mandated health insurance should be in support of it because less of your premium and taxes are supporting deadbeats and unemployed. If you support mandatory auto insurance, and those state laws that require it haven't been overturned, I don't see why mandatory health insurance is such a problem.
As my friend pointed out, owning a car is optional. If you can't afford auto insurance, you can't afford to own a car. However, your body is not. I guess choosing to die is, but that's another discussion. If your body is wrecked, it needs to get fixed. And somebody needs to pay for it.
And as I have often mentioned, the primary reasons for the high cost of health care and insurance are A) so many people putting claims in because they are so unhealthy - imagine the cost of auto coverage if people treated their cars like their bodies and made claims for every thing that went wrong - and B) the extraordinarily expensive treatments that rely too much on technological easy fixes and ignore common sense preventative care. But neither this congress nor the president is doing anything beyond lip service to getting our population healthier. Why? Because there's no profit in that.
Mandated insurance coverage, if teamed up with sensible, proactive agriculture policies, instead of letting McDonald's, Monsanto, and Conagra write them, would gain some headway into lowered costs. But government corruption goes hand-in-hand with corporate influence. Why do you think drugs are so expensive, and we haven't had a new antibiotic introduced in 30 years, while we have 30 choices for penis pills, marketed to flaccid wheezers who don't exercise and eat fries at every meal?
The quandary is that the Right-ish stance should also be in support of spending your money how you see fit. Yet, aren't the Right supposed to be the realists? People who choose to be uninsured - speaking broadly here, auto, etc - do nothing but fuck over responsible people. And the government's job is to protect responsible people, if nothing else.
To clarify, I am not referring to another drain on the system: people who cannot afford health insurance but either don't have employment or employment that subsidizes it. Further, I am not speaking about existing conditions upon new-employment, or children with congenital conditions. These are not all morons: in fact, I was uninsured for three months in 2007, which included passing on a trip to the ER for a concussion after crashing my bike, until I found another job.
With these instances, there needs to be a safety net that allows people who NEED it to have an affordable option - not a gold-plated Cadillac, but adequate - until they can find their own coverage. Without it, we are the ones who pay for their healthcare, through higher premiums our providers charge. Obamacare provides for this.
But, as a whole, it won't work because of other the problem I mentioned that is canceling out any gains to be made in lower premium by an increased risk pool; the high demand on the system by our society in general and the manufacturers of needlessly extravagant treatments and techniques. There needs to be a far greater emphasis on preventative care, rather than just fixing what's broken in a giant, losing game of Whack-a-Mole.
We are just going to perpetuate the current disease-management system.
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