[quote]Mikeyali wrote:
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]borrek wrote:
[quote]pushharder wrote:
By the way, I’m not sure if this has been mentioned yet but under this incredibly generous plan please explain why anyone would buy health insurance before they actually need it. [/quote]
As demonstrated by passing of the Health Care Affordability Act, some of us do the right thing.[/quote]
Purty lame response. When it comes to the “deep thinking” type stuff you go on holiday, doncha?[/quote]
But Friend push, let’s be fair to Borrek. He has made a rational decision for himself.
What he does not know, is that lurking across the street from him is the Antiborrek family. Antiborrek has come to a different rational conclusion. He has decided that this year, he will pay the $1000 fine, but save the $6000 on insurance premiums for his family of four. You see, he needs the $5000 to spend on chrome-plated dirt-bikes for him and his son. When his daughter–that 4 year old whom Mr Axelrod is always mentioning–gets glomerulonephritis or a dirt-bike injury, Antiborrek will sign up for the high risk pool. She cannot be denied access, after all, and he gets to keep his dirt-bikes.
Well the insurance intermediary has a new customer and a new expense immediately. The riwsk has not been shared for the prior year, so they decide they must increase the rates for our rational friend, Borrek. (Oh, you say, the law will prevent that. Then that insurance company may prefer not to write policies in Michigan.) Perhaps the government will underwrite a high risk policy; taxes, after all will pay for it and Borrek is a responsible taxpayer.
Each family has make a rational choice. But who has come out ahead? Now why would Borrek want to put his family at such a disadvantage–more premiums, or withdrawal of the policy or higher taxes?
Dirt-bikes: the only answer. Chrome-plated.[/quote]
Hell, I’m sufficiently pissed off that I just may drop my health insurance and do this. I’m been eligible for lots of damned federal programs I’ve avoided out of pride and the fact that I’m not poor. Anyone with an Xbox and a roof over their head isn’t poor. I won’t take any money from Idaho, but I’m really entertaining taking money from every fed program I can get.
mike
[/quote]
Some would call this, oh, “enabling the moral hazard.” But let’s be clear: The program promotes results antithetical to its own purpose.
For purposes of discussion, let’s say there are two camps of dissenters. Mikeyali and Push and thunderbolt, for example, might oppose this monstrosity of a health bill because it has unconstitutional precedents, or promotes federal suasion over what more properly be a local concern. In the other camp of dissenters are those who may want some coherent policy–whether state or regional or federal–but insist it must have the minimum of coercion, and the maximum benefit for the minimum expense. (In the support group is a coalition of folks who simply believe that resources are inexhaustible, everyone has rights to every resource, and it is heartless to argue otherwise.)
(Let’s face it, this is not exactly socialism, but it is a method of wealth redistribution using the resource sphere of medical care, a redistribution from taxpayers and rate-payers to insurance companies with only a momentary pause among the needy and sick. Why is it the government’s business to direct funds to increase insurance companies aggregate revenue? Who the hell in their right mind would dare call this “reform?”)
We have covered some of this ground before.
There is no need to repeat the downstream consequences that are invited by the passage of this monstrous incoherent and impractical bill.
If I had a magic wand, it would all go away. Perhaps it will. thunderbolt, elsewhere, is correct in pointing out the obvious: if only the mandate to buy insurance is deemed unconstitutional, the whole fabric of this law unravels, and some other monstrosity will need to be considered.
Which then?
It is not an idle question. We see how Borrek/Antiborrek and mikeyali would respond. I am a “provider” (I detest the term, which equates me with a vending machinge), a small businessman, an employer, an occasional patient of the most querulous type. This law demands my response in each of these roles, and as far as I can tell, has no “immediate benefits” worthy of the term.
Those who support it will never acknowledge the contrary results which it will inevitably produce; but they will find easy scapegoats for the failure of this law.