No, neither am I. It will set a terrible precedent if the government is allowed to order us to buy something.
Yet we have to remember that as a society, we have an ethic in place right now that we do not deny care to someone who is sick or injured if they can’t pay for it or are uninsured. That’s why we have emergency rooms and Medicaid, and hospitals that just eat the loss.
If we go back to “nothing,” then the insured will continue to pay an unfair burden of the overall cost of health care: They pay for their own insurance and then they pay taxes to cover those who have no money
Under single-payer, THEORETICALLY, everyone pays the same and gets the same care. Economies of scale, and the elimination of the insurance companies’ profits, SHOULD make it less expensive overall.
If I trusted the government, I would be in favor of this, but I don’t. So I guess I would prefer sticking with the present plan that penalizes the responsible, until we can come up with something better, or the world ends.
I understand fully your arguement.
But, there are other elements to the problem we all know exists.
Hospitals continue to raise prices, claiming the “uninsured” drive costs up. I personally doubt this claim (at least where I live). One of the Hospital systems that makes this claim spends MILLIONS buliding huge mega hospitals trying to “corner” the market so to speak.
They have systematically bought small “neighborhood” hospitals. It seems they have been positioning themselves to become the Government Hospital of Choice for the Fed mandated patients.
My point with this is that the uninsured, granted cost the insured. But the largest cost to the insured is the hospitals and Docs that raise costs to cover non-patient activities. It’s sort of like education. The rising cost of edu is not student related. It is all about the unions and non edu activities.
We as a people are demanding that the Government be accountable and end the days of spending on unneccessary projects.
We should demand the same of hospitals as well. Ofcourse they will make the arguement that they are “private” entities. But, without Medicare/medicaid, private ins, they would be out of business.
I hope I am making myself clear. But, thee is much more to the high cost of med care and increased ins premiums than the uninsured.
When the law was passed to make denial of care illegal, some not all took it as a green light to milk the system.
It became the catchall excuse for raising costs.
Before we deny care to anyone, we must demand that care providers become accountable to the public. That ofcourse is best handled at the local/state level.