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I can’t imagine any health insurance company paying for a hip replacement for someone who is terminally ill - even if they have a couple of years left.

Let us say you have paid into a health insurance company all of your life, the time comes to have a hip replacement, but the company says, the actuarial tables say you only have 3 years to live why should we pay for a hip replacement? The answer of a person with a brain would be: "Because I have paid X amount of bucks into your program and you owe me this hip replacement, I have 3 year years left, and maybe more despite your tables, and I want them to be pain free and myself mobile. Pay up."

If you think that government insurance isn't paid for day after frickin' day by taxpayers who work for a living then you need a new brain. Embracing this type of BS means that you are not a conservative but are a liberal at best, and a communist at worst.

I vote for communist.

I’m pretty sure the insurance company will still tell you to go to hell. The company doesn’t “owe” you anything just because you’ve been paying in for a long time. Consider what you’re paying for as “instantaneous” coverage. It doesn’t matter if you’ve paid for 10 years straight, if you stop, that coverage stop. It also doesn’t matter if you started paying for it a year ago and get sick (if the length of time you had insurance mattered, it wouldn’t really be insurance).

Everyone here complaining about not wanting some “bureaucrat getting between you and healthcare” is ignoring the fact that that is the case already. Whether it is an insurance company or a gov’t, nobody wants to waste healthcare resources. Private insurance companies actually have *more* of an incentive to deny you care, since they get to keep anything they don’t spend on you. An “efficient” private insurance company pays out as little as possible. I can’t even express in words how dumb some of the people in this comments section are.

As someone who is a cancer survivor, I know all about fighting with insurance companies. I know what it's like to have my credit score go down because of a fricking insurance company taking 10 and 12 months to pay ordinary, routine claims. I know what it's like to have ordinary, routine claims denied again and again. (Some folks will pay up, so it's in their best interest to deny.)

I believe that we are going to get screwed, but we probably deserve that. The republicans were in power for years, and did nothing to solve the healthcare crisis in this country. We needed better regulations and better laws to protect people who forked over their hardearned money to insurance companies and got screwed.

And if you haven't sat in a cancer treatment room with other people going through the same thing, I can understand why your opinion might be different.

Or if you haven't had a child in college who came down with a serious illness but had to continue to take a full load of classes so she could be on our insurance you have no idea how absolutely screwey the laws are.

But just because you paid insurance for THREE FRICKING DECADES DOESN'T MEAN A DAMN THING.

We need better laws and regulations, but we're going to get a lot more than that. Get used to bending over for the government, but - hey! - I already know what that feels like. :(