Posted on 11/13/2005 1:52:48 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
East Boston realtor Ulises Rosa is 31 years old and healthy. He has a taste for fine wine, likes to host catered dinner parties, and travels often. But he bristles at the idea that the state may force him to buy health insurance, just as he must buy auto insurance.
''A car you can choose to own," said Rosa, who makes more than $60,000 a year. ''You can't force me to get insurance if I don't want to. It's my life."
Rhetoric surrounding the healthcare debate in Massachusetts has been largely shaped by plans to extend coverage to the poor. But two of the major initiatives under consideration by the Legislature would also, for the first time, require everyone who is able to afford it to buy private health insurance. Massachusetts would be the first state to impose such a requirement, a shift being hailed by many observers as forcing a new personal responsibility in the national debate over how people should get insurance.
But such a requirement, which would be aimed largely at the 200,000 or so people in the Commonwealth who are young, single, healthy, and without coverage, is setting off resentment among the uninsured. Their voices have rarely been heard on Beacon Hill, where insurers, doctors, and hospital executives jostle for attention from lawmakers writing the bills.
''I have so many expenses. I have a mortgage on my condo . . . car insurance. You try to maintain a certain lifestyle. After that, all your money is gone," said Rosa, as he sat in his roomy office, where a $200 leather jacket he bought in Buenos Aires hung on the back of his chair.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
"who makes more than $60,000 a year"
$ 60,001 ? $ 600,000? $ 6,000,000 ? All more than $ 60000 ! Journalists ...
After confiscatory federal, state and local taxes, professional licensing and mandatory continuing education fees, etc., he probably nets about half that. Let's add another mandatory cost imposed by the state and see if we can get him below the poverty line so that he gives up, collects welfare, and becomes a dependent Dimwit voter for the rest of his life.
***......But Raymond, the South End bartender, echoed the criticism of some liberal healthcare advocates who want a government-run system. He said the move to force people to buy insurance would funnel money to insurance companies, not provide better healthcare.
''You have other countries where it doesn't cost a thing, or $50 a month," he said. ''It's an awful system of people just trying to make money off people, and it's gotten way out of hand.".......***
-Kennedy/Kerry country-
I really dislike FR spellcheck!
Idiot, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
"Idiot, there's no such thing as a free lunch."
Unless your an illegal alien in America where the free lunch abounds in plenty. I think $50 a month would be a fair shake. How much do you think it should be?
There is no free lunch.
What kind of service and quality would you you'd get for $50?
Free enterprise is the only path to excellence.
Third party pay must be scrapped.
Isn't this part and parcel of Hillary's grand design for healthcare? Free for the deadbeats who won't buy the insurance, and drawing more blood (a.k.a. money) from those who actually work. I can't understand the angst expressed in the article. (please notice sarcasm )
Applause!
His $60K salary would be the equivalent of about $40K where I live. At his age he could buy high deductible insurance for under $100 a month.
If he can't round up a $100 a month, he has a lifestyle problem.
It's not binary. A third alternative is no health care. A fourth alternative is "pay-as-you-go" health care.
If he is forced to round up $100/month by the state, for the sole reason that it "lowers the risk pool for 'other' insured people", then he has a very different kind of problem.
When insurance systems depend on cross-subsidation for solvency, they are no longer insurance systems but schemes for income transfer. One's benefits from "health insurance" schemes depend on age, family structure, and where your particular insurance program falls on the coercive "food chain" of cost shifting and subsidies.
At the top are Medicare and Medicaid, further down are the nationally marketed private networks (United Health Care, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, etc), further yet are the large corporate health care plans with sufficient clout to negotiate good discounts from the provider networks), near the bottom are small employers and their workers, and at the bottom are those who have enough income to be disqualified from Medicaid and other welfare programs, but uninsured (so they get to pay the providers' "sticker price" into which the various cost shiftings from those higher on the food chain have been loaded).
Bottom line: these "social insurance" systems have devolved into Darwinian "food chains" of exploitation (with hefty adminstrative fees collected along the way at every stage of the "chain" to put some constraints on the graft, fraud, and manipulation of accounting systems that infest the whole system).
Bottom bottom line: manange your own health, and avoid as much as possible the "in-network medical service providers" and all of the associated administrative/financial kingdoms that have grown up like weeds to choke out the original purpose of the medical arts. They will pick your pockets, and you will still be dead in the end. In the meantime, enjoy other goods with your money, and be happier with the results. One bright sign: medical arts practitioners who are opting out and offering their services "cash on the barrelhead" to the "uninsured". May their number increase, and may the "compassionate lawmakers" and "social regulators" be blocked from ever making their activity illegal!
One step that could and I think should be taken is a consumer protection in health insurance. No one has a clue what the are actually paying for with their own health insurance policy.
If there were standard insurance polices people could actually compare coverage/cost of a policy. It is wrong we have allowed the health insurance industry to create policies so confusing that we can't compare them and no one knows what they bought.
Also no one knows if they get what they actually paid for. Did your dr's bill get paid correctly? Who knows! As a patient you don't get involved in it as long as they don't bill you.
When the health care provider started billing your insurance company it removed capitalism from the system. Why are we surprised the cost sky rocketed up?
This is laughable from a state that priced individuals out of the market with all the mandatory coverages they imposed on insurance providers.
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