Roger’s Rules » Crunch Time for Health Care: Now It’s Up to Us
What is meant by a “weak mandate” is that, in the current version of the Baucus bill, there is no requirement to buy health insurance at all until after 2013, and by 2017 the penalty for failing to buy health insurance still amounts to only about 15% of the cost of the insurance. Now, think about it: if you know that you don’t have to buy health insurance when you are young and healthy, but if you should get sick, or just get older, you can apply for health insurance at any time and it will be illegal for the insurance company to turn you down, what would you do? Obviously, you would defer buying insurance unless and until you get sick. This means that the pool of those who are insured will be lower quality, and the cost therefore higher for everyone who buys insurance. It is as though you could wait until you die, and then your heirs can buy life insurance on you.
The problem with making this the do-or-die stumbling block to socialized medicine is that the “solution” is obvious and simple: institute a strong mandate.
I can see what is coming. This “weak mandate” thing is passed and then, a few years down the road, when it is going broke, the call will be to “institute the mandates necessary to save our health care system.”
That is what we mean when we talk about Obama’s “camel’s nose under the tent flap” strategy. They won’t be able to get all they want this first time around. But they’ll get enough to make getting the rest inevitable down the road.
The only solution is to kill this beast now. We aren’t going to get any second chances.
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Agreed - this is more “shit sandwich” politicking. They’re simply trying to get agreement based on putting less shit-filling inside the bread, and spreading it out thinner - with zero meaningful or effective guarantee that they won’t add a heapin’ helping of merde a couple of years down the line.
Why should anyone have to pay anything - even one skinny dime - as a “penalty” for not buying what they don’t want, and likely don’t need anyway?
And just how - whether it’s “weak” or “strong” - is a Gubmint mandate to pay for something you don’t want, or pay a “penalty” for not paying for the something-you-don’t-want, different from involuntary - and unjustifiable - taxation?
If “public option” health-care insurance is going to be such a great, low-cost, cover-everything deal-of-a-lifetime - why does it need to come with any sort of mandate at all?
And if it won’t serve the alleged purposes of “reforming/reducing the cost of health care insurance” absent such a mandate - how can it possibly serve those purposes with such a mandate? Particularly the way this stupid “weak mandate” is apparently structured?