These people act as if a Health Reimbursement Account is a major crime.
Why should somebody like Rush Limbaugh pay for insurance for IUD’s and abortions, when he’ll never need them and can easily pay out-of-pocket when he is checked out for a heart attack in a Hawaii hospital? Or whatever else comes up.
The reason people have HRA’s is because the amount they would pay for insurance and deductibles would exceed what they would pay out-of-pocket if they simply paid the medical bills themselves. Some people have only catastrophic insurance.
And why does the government think it is their business anyway? Right now the people who abide by the laws have auto insurance to cover not only their own responsibilities but also to cover damages that are the responsibility of people who drive without being insured. We are DOUBLE-COVERED. Same thing with home-owner’s insurance. We’ve got insurance in case we get injured through somebody else’s negligence and they can’t pay medical expenses, AND we have insurance in case somebody gets injured while on our property, whether it is because of our negligence or not. We are double-insured. If everybody was double insured, we would have expenses covered FOUR TIMES for every one actually medical expense.
As it is right now, the insured people are picking up the tab for those who are not insured - making sure that doctors and medical facilities get enough to keep them in business in spite of the people who get services that they can’t pay for. The free market is already taking care of this problem. It would be nice if insurance rates did not have to include the cost of covering for the uninsured who can’t or won’t pay for their own medical costs, but just by virtue of the government being involved - and THEM pocketing the penalty money, not giving that money back to US, the ones who are paying the medical bills for those who won’t - health insurance costs are going UP, not down.
Why should the federal government rake in money as a reward for me paying somebody else’s bills? This is just a money-raising scheme for the feds - which does NOTHING to relieve the fact that we who are insured are paying for the “free-loaders”, and simply adds MORE TAXES to all of us to pay for this massive ponzi scheme by the federal government.
GRRRR.
That point is the only one in your excellent post I would disagree with. Contrary to your position that "doctors and medical facilities get enough to keep them in business ...," that is not always the case. Despite some "cost shifting," there have been many medical practices and hospitals that have gone broke over recent decades due to both deadbeat patients and insufficient insurance reimbursements, both from government and "private" insurers. Trying to collect from third parties (i.e., insurers) also imposes a steep overhead on medical facilities.
The solution to that problem, of course, is more out-of-pocket payments by patients (through higher deductible plans and HSAs or HRAs), not more government mandates which eliminate high deductible policies and "catastrophic" policies from the mix of options.