Poll Shows Baucus Individual Mandate To Buy Health Insurance Unpopular
Consumer Watchdog countered Senator Max Baucus’ (D-MT) contention that the mandatory purchase of health insurance was popular with Americans by pointing to a poll showing that voters overwhelmingly reject requiring proof of private health insurance when they are told they might have to pay some of the premium costs.
I’ll bet on one of the following reasons being behind Baucus’s claim that most Americans support being forced to buy insurance:
- He was lying
- The poll was only of older people
- The poll didn’t mention that the consumer might have to pay for part of the cost
Buying health insurance is a poor bet for a young, healthy, childless person. Especially if his employer isn’t picking up a good chunk of the cost “for free”, his premiums are subsidizing the older and sicker. But of course that’s why Hillary Bitch Clinton wanted to force them into the system, and Massholeachusetts pulled it off.
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
Even young, healthy, childless people should have health insurance coverage for catastrophic events.
Trauma care is tremendously expensive and even young healthy people get hit by “buses”.
This happens often enough that having health insurance with a high deductible for unexpected collisions with large moving objects is a very good idea.
Perhaps true - although such a blanket statement tends to ignore some pertinent factors* - but that’s beside the point, since that’s only a part of the health insurance picture. It’s also quite likely not the kind of insurance Baucus and similar coverage-for-all advocates would like to mandate for everyone.
Consider this: Even beyond TANSTAAFL**, the kind of health coverage that’s likely to be the subject of Democrat-led mandates will not be “free” - except for those on the bottom end of the economic scale (and, of course, quite likely for your friendly local Illegal Aliens - who are already “subsidized” in many locales when it comes to emergency room and other medical services). Even Medicare, as it is presently constituted, is not free of up-front charges - I pay a quarterly premium for Part B coverage. The simple truth is, any mandated “universal” health insurance coverage will cost everyone who makes enough money to pay taxes an up-front premium - those who fall below the minimum-taxpayer income line will be subsidized (once again) by the rest of us.
Besides - make no mistake, accidental-trauma coverage will be only a relatively small part of what the mandatory health insurance plan will look like. A much more substantial part will encompass HMO-like “preventive medicine,” childhood illness/disease treatment, geriatric and other chronic-illness coverages, etc. The intent will be to cover all illness, disability, injury or medical requirement, large or small - “unexpected collisions with moving objects” will be included, of course, but will not be the bulk of what’s covered.
*If you mandate trauma-care coverage for younger, likely more risk-prone people - even with a high deductible - who’s likely to actually pay the premiums? Younger people themselves, who may have little (or no) income of their own? There are, of course, other factors at work here -
**Heinlein fans know this one well: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch - everything costs something; someone pays, the only question is who.
Regarding Catastrophic Medical Insurance, there is another point.
I live in Fl and own a small business. Many years ago, I purchased a Catastrophic Medical Insurance Policy. It had a $2K annual deductible and then paid 80%. Since I get the flu every other year, and that’s about it, it was perfect for my needs.
Fast forward a few years. The State of FL passed a law that MANDATED that all policies sold in the state meet certain coverage, deductible, etc requirements.
Overnight, my premium went from $53/MO to $257/MO. In other words, under my old policy, I could have paid the $2k deductible EVERY FREAKIN’ YEAR and STILL SAVED MONEY.
Yes, I was, and still am, PIS***.
BTW - You do NOT want to know what the premium is now.
DCP
DCP, the problem is that our health care system, like so much else, is not a health insurance system, it’s a cost pooling system, which means a wealth transfer system. In order for it to function, young people must be coerced to overpay for healthcare in order to subsize old people. Most young people, with the exception of women intending to have children, only need a catastrophic policy. If the law let us do that, though, then they’d go broke providing platinum-plated everything-included care to the elderly. As a result, everyone is forced to buy platinum-plated insurance, whether they need it or not.
If anyone wonders why socialism induces demographic collapse, this is why - we pillage the young and productive to subsidize the old and unproductive. The seed corn, the money that young people would like to be spending on having a family, is being eaten rather than planted. Financially and reproductively responsible young adults all have to wait until their 30s, if not early 40s, to get enough income and wealth to be able to afford families, so we produce mostly children of the financially and reproductively irresponsible, many of whom then also need handouts from the productive.
The whole thing runs slower and slower until it collapses, is taken over from the outside, or Atlas shrugs. This is the price of “Me First” thinking, attempting personal immortality and the resulting disconnect from the cycle of life, rather than accepting the inevitability of personal death and cultivating the future generations.
DCP, that’s exactly what happened to me in CA. I had a nice catastrophic care policy that suited me fine, at a very reasonable rate. I’ve always considered health care to be the same as basic home or car maintenance. Who would pay for an insurance policy that covered repainting your fence or changing the oil on your car? Why so many people think health care should be free from dollar one is incomprehensible to me (Canada tried to mandate a $5 copay…yes, five dollars…for office visits and there was nearly an insurrection).
But then CA started requiring certain kinds of coverage…then lowered the maximum deductible allowed on catastrophic care…and within four years my premiums had more than tripled. By such cunning moves we shift towards socialized medicine, because the first step is to make it all but impossible to get or afford private insurance…then the government steps in to “help.”
I am currently self-insured, placing what used to be my policy payments into a separate bank account. It’s amazing how it’s added up. That should last me until I can attach myself to Medicare like a leech, assuming I don’t need a liver transplant or some sort of cutting-edge cancer treatment before that. But the actuarial tables work for me just as well as they work for Blue Shield, so why not make my own personal health care my own personal business?
I assume this is a clumsy effort at a troll. If not, I’ll be responding. Scathingly.
Toren, was that “CA” Canada or California?
Bill, you’re not expecting me to answer that, are you? That would ruin the fun!
Ah. Troll.
And, actually, a pretty good one. Almost got me.
Close, but no cigar, martinra…
DCP, I feel your pain - I was very nearly sucked into a similar situation while living in FL, when we started a small business there (initially, supplementary to my daytime job, intended to replace it in a few years) and were starting to transition away from employer-”subsidized” health insurance. Just about the time that we folded that particular tent (due to a variety of other issues), I became aware that FL has been rapidly becoming extremely wacky about insurance of all kinds. In our case, the solution was collateral to what we were doing to solve some other, bigger problems - we sold everything, and got the hell out of FL (back to Tarheel Territory).
Short of relocating from a state that’s hosting this kind of nanny-statism - entirely to the benefit of insurance companies (and the pols that are fed by them) - to one that hasn’t yet bent over and spread ‘em for the insurance execs, Toren’s solution would seem to be the only useful (if perhaps risky) way to go. Best of luck…
I’ve never liked the whole “pooled-risk” health-insurance thing, even when I was a public school employee and therefore in an actuarially low-risk “pool” (with concomitant relatively-very-low premiums and very thorough coverages) - it just seems inherently unstable, somehow, similar to Social Security. Also, I’ve become convinced, over the years, that the insurance companies only became really wealthy and powerful in the U.S. when they sold both the medical profession and large-scale employers (both public and private) on comprehensive health insurance as a thrifty and efficient solution to their problems*. That wealth and power has been at work for a long time, and not to the benefit of most ordinary working people.
*The problems: Medical people wanted to be paid, promptly and as fully as possible, employers wanted to retain a relatively stable employee group without paying ever-higher salaries due to competition with other employers. Health insurance plans were pitched as a way to serve both purposes.
You win some, you lose some.