Posted on 12/19/2020 5:21:15 AM PST by Kaslin
Kamala Harris wants to take away your private health insurance and replace it with some awful version of health insurance administered by the federal government. Why is this a bad idea? In the automobile insurance industry, all customers of a carrier pay into a large pool. Those who tap the insurance company’s resources as a result of mounting claims, due to accidents and poor driving, experience a rate increase.
Good Behavior, Disproportionate Reward
Good drivers can maintain low rates for the duration of their driving lives, but even good drivers, among a larger pool of drivers at the state level, still pay a bit more than they would otherwise because of their proximity to poor drivers.
While some health insurance companies offer lower premiums for policyholders who have healthy habits – and the ACA didn’t prevent such incentives – no widespread system was in place. Missing from discussions about the “Affordable” Care Act, known as Obamacare, was the suitability of having some people pay for others. Essentially, this is how insurance works, but applying this technique to healthcare is problematic.
The ACA made everyone pay, in part, for the poor health habits of others; people with unhealthy lifestyles who drove up the costs of premiums. The ACA granted millions of overweight and obese people, smokers, heavy drinkers, etc., insurance when they were already insured prior to the ACA. Who knows what proportion of new entrants to the health insurance pool were smokers, were overweight, and had other unhealthy habits? Without useful data, we knew little about the masses with unhealthy habits who were contorting the system.
Where's My Good Health Habits Bonus?
Suppose you spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on your health. At every meal, you watch what you eat. You exercise regularly and visit the doctor for periodic checkups. You read articles and books on health. If you have an ailment, you talk to others who have or have had it. Year after year, you spend good money on preventative care measures. In short, you take responsibility for your own health every single day.
Now, we drop you into a pool with masses of people who do little or nothing of what is described above. They eat what they like, whenever they want, with no regard to the caloric and nutritional content of what they ingest, and with no regard to added sugars, sodium content, fat content, additives, or preservatives. They don’t exercise regularly and ultimately allow themselves to slip into larger and larger clothing sizes on the way to being overweight, and then obese.
These sedentary individuals have little or no regimen for maintaining their health. They might smoke, drink, take drugs, or participate in hazardous activities. They populate hospital emergency rooms in sizable numbers. They are predisposed to pop pills for whatever ails them. They do not read health magazines. They see doctors when something has gone wrong, and, when given medical advice, sometimes ignore it.
The Indiscretion of Youth?
We're not talking about adolescence here, or even late teens or individuals in their early 20s. Today, within all sectors of the economy, legions of 30- to 80-year-olds engage in such behaviors as if no long-term consequences for their unhealthy habits will result. Some, literally, don't make a scintilla of an effort to stay healthy.
With the lesser volume of claims that you submit over the course of a year, a decade, or a lifetime, is it fair that the premiums you pay partially cover the artificially lower premiums paid by others? Should you be penalized because of those who repeatedly demonstrate that they do not take responsibility for their own health?
At some point, those with unhealthy habits will have their premiums raised for the simple reason that they are "bad investments" for the insurance companies. While some portion of your ACA premium subsidized people with unhealthy habits, eventually those people would bear more, but never all, of the cost of their illnesses through higher premiums.
Blather On
The fact that two out of three U.S. adults are overweight or obese speaks volumes about the state of public health today: we are not a healthy populace and the trends are getting worse. If you discuss these issues with proponents of government-administered health insurance, they offer no answer. They blather on about how everyone has a "right" to healthcare and about utopian ideals. They never examine the ramifications of their ingrained beliefs.
Invariably, they seek to steer the conversation toward some grandiose vision of a republic where all its citizens – not to mention illegal aliens – are offered "affordable" healthcare. Massive, ingrained poor health habits be damned.
People taking responsibility for their own lives?? Naaaaaah. That’s the government’s job!
The cost to the system is people who ruined their immune systems and livers with mass quantities of booze, drugs and STDs. The super high flyers in medical costs to the system are the people living on the street. None of that I choose, why should I pay for it.
Exactly the same rules as the greens want to extract from the oil producers. Pay for those costs with excise taxes on booze, weed and hookers.
My ‘healthcare option’ is the V.A.
Like so many other American citizens, I ‘paid’ for that with service to my country in a time of war.
Now that I can use the services of ‘off-base’ doctors, the bean counters that serve those doctors, can never get it straight to bill the V.A., and constantly mis-bill medicare, creating an unpaid balance, which they attempt to charge to me, monthly!!
Now, if the whore wants to monkey with your healthcare set-up, just keep this information in mind.
(Yup, I wrote that intentionally, too)
I wish I was one of those 160 lb 70 year olds I see on TV sitting with their hot 68 year old wife, calling for all they deserve from SS commercials we see Joe Namath popularizung . ...
But, NO-OOOOOO
What I would like to see is a study of the medical bills over the lifetime of people who lead healthy lives vs those who live unhealthy lives.
A person who lives a healthy life may find that at age 75 they have a nasty disease that results in hundreds of thousands of medical bills to treat.
A person who lives an unhealthy life may be dead at age 45 and the medical bills over their lifetime are minimal.
I am not for any of this stuff. Humans aren’t perfect and never will be. This is just another way to GIVE the government more control and turn more people into self gratifying little snitches and holier than thou jerks.
To name a FEW things that improve health. Like putting your penis in the kazoo of another male, and breaking the wall of the rectum...who has to pay for this? Or putting a gerbil up your kazoo to make you feel good..? Who pays for this? How about sleeping around with all Tom Dicks and Harry and expect the group to pay for your gonorrhea and herpes. How about drinking into a stuper, and smoking to fill lungs, being a couch potato and ending up with diabetes. WE REALLY NEED TO HAVE A SERIOUS TALK, and create an insurance group of people who live responsible. Bible language is to poop, then cover it up with a shovel, personal hygiene, rest, WORRY is a big killer, and HATE. I don’t like anything Kamala Harris proposes.
If I want to eat a hamburger and fries, does that make you a Nazi.
“Why is this a bad idea?”
Put simply, it’s a racket. If the insurance company is making you pay for other people’s bad habits, and the government is making you pay for insurance, bad habits quickly become illegal. Your habits are everyone’s business and you owe it to your fellow man to behave as dictated, or be punished.
Insurance should never be government mandated. There is only one sure outcome: loss of freedom. That is the intention.
Biden scares me, but Kamala “the whore” Harris terrifies me.
Jezebel and the other marxists want everyone (except the ruling elite) to have the same coverage. So no one (except the ruling elite) would have an advantage over another. No matter how hard you work, you would get the same benefits as the indolent slacker so loved by the democrats.
There is no way the privileged class will have the same benefits as the ordinary people. They will, as they have already, give themselves special favors so that they pay less and get more, at our expense. The privileged class is current and former politicians and rich individuals who give money to the democrats.
Yay, we are all going to die; no one gets out of here alive.
I continually see/hear adverts about food insecurity and millions who go to bed hungry every night. Those folks must hide indoors, because whenever I’m driving through poor areas, most of the visible peeps range from chubby to obese.
I’m not sure which is more annoying, Namath for Medicare Advantage or Tom “Reverse Mortgage” Selleck.
If your health is so great then skip buying health insurance altogether. You won’t need it, right? Oh, wait, your health isn’t so perfect, your genes are not godly, you’re just as clumsy and prone to accidents as anyone else, and you will suffer a medical complication that requires medical intervention.
Seems like the bitching about other people and their health issues is childish in nature.
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