Posted on 06/22/2005 4:47:29 PM PDT by inquest
Massachusetts residents who choose not to obtain health insurance would face tax penalties and even the garnishing of their wages under a proposal Governor Mitt Romney unveiled yesterday.
-snip-
Under Romney's proposal, uninsured Massachusetts residents would be asked to enroll in a plan when they seek care.
If they refuse, the state could recoup the medical costs in several ways, Romney said yesterday: The state might cancel the personal tax exemption on their state income taxes, which is worth about $175. It could withhold some or all of their state income tax refund and deposit it in what Romney called a ''personal healthcare spending account." Or, it might take money out of the person's paycheck, as it does now to collect child support.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
That is still too much cost!
Most illegal aliens will be unaffected by such steps.
You could say this is for the protection of people one might harm -- hospitals and those paying insurance premiums.
Dear inquest,
"Not even close. Driving was never considered a right, and the insurance is mandated not for your own protection, but for the protection of the people you might harm."
Well, the harm comes when otherwise healthy, uninsured people become injured or unexpectedly ill, and cannot afford the health resources they then require. Then the rest of us are harmed by having to pay for what the uninsured individual cannot.
If the uninsured were willing to sign irrevocable statements assuring that they will not request medical treatment that they cannot pay for in advance of treatment, even under pain of lingering, exruciating, painful death, then you'd be right, there would be no harm to us.
But I've known a few uninsured folks who got into a bit of health trouble, and I didn't notice any of them turn down the health care given to them, and ultimately paid for by slobs like myself.
sitetest
So how then should we handle the problem of people who can't afford their hospital bills? Refuse emergency/life saving treatment? That seems to be the only other fair option.
My own health Insurance is over $800 a month.
Tell me that dont put a hurt on ya.
geez...that's rough
check out ehealthinsurance.com and see if you can better....especially if you want an HSA
Fascist.
Shoot 'em and decrease the surplus population!
Seriously this country's going nuts when a Governor says what he said AND people think it's a good idea.
Make insurance illegal. (And watch health care prices collapse.)
ML/NJ
If they require everyone to have health insurance, who is going to pay the insurance for people who can't afford it? When they did that with car insurance the price tag shot upwards and stayed there. No one has the right to tell people they have to have insurance. I thought republicans were for less government not more! If this gets a foothold it will be a short wait until state mandated health care and then see where your taxes end up, through the roof! Kill this stuff now!
Mine is $1200 per month in CA due to pre-existing conditions. I had to drop it, and pay all my Docs visits out of my pocket and pray that I don't have a catastrophic illness anytime soon. I had to make a choice, somewhere to sleep and something to eat or no health insurance. Many people are in the same boat. The evil here is insurance, mainly Medicare. As soon as it was enacted health costs skyrocketed and then all the Unions struck for health insurance and that made it worse. Insurance has caused health care to be so expensive, IMO.
You can not have an HSA in my state, because the state of NC does not allow it, absent an employer provided cafeteria plan exemption.
And as far as "affording" privately paid health insurance options,either rent a clue, or shut up about a topic you have no knowledge about!
Unless you are of the opinion that a healthy 25 year old single person should pay $600.00 a month in premiums just so you don't have any out of pocket increases for your new Viagra prescription benefits./sarcasm/?
"So how then should we handle the problem of people who can't afford their hospital bills?"
Undo the rotten legislation that fostered this problem.
I live in Massachusetts and this whole crisis with uninsured patients was brought on BY THE STATE GOVERNMENT when AIDS first became a problem.
Before AIDS, insurance companies in MA could sell major medical policies to poor folk that were affordable by nearly everyone. There was no need for anyone to be uninsured except for the very poorest of the poor. Then
AIDS erupted and the state passed politically correct legislation that required MA insurance companies to insure anyone who walked through the door and wanted insurance, sick with AIDS or not.(In other states insurance companies check new customers for pre-existing conditions)
Unsurprisingly, the price of major medical coverage subsequently shot up to be almost the same as 100% coverage like an HMO.
Now, if one wants to purchase a Blue Cross family health plan, it costs over $900 per month. If one wants the individual coverage, it is $370 per month. Too expensive for folks with very moderate incomes like me.
I live one tenth of a mile from NH, and major med insurance there is about $200 per month, but I'm not allowed to buy it there.
So the state of MA gave thousands of poorer working folks a reaming, forever removing health insurance from their grasp, so it could kiss up to AIDS constituencies so that those few people in the state with AIDS could have insurance.
The state hurts a majority (the politically weak, remember) to help a few (the politically powerful).
It is disgusting, to say the least. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Mitt.
That's the trouble with socialism. You can't have a little of it. It truly is all or nothing.
I don't have health insurance. I belong to a PPO Network. How does this bill affect those that joined a network? The network is not insurance.
Sounds like Communism to me.
I grew up in a time where almost no one had health insurance. People weren't dying in the streets. Office visits were $5, and (late lamented) house calls were $7. (Maybe $50 and $70 respectively today with all the money the government has printed in the interim.) The BS is that the technology advances have diven the price up. But try to think of another technology based field (e.g. TV's, computers, air fare) where real prices have increased. (One of my first Rush calls was about this.)
ML/NJ
If you're a healthy 25 yo and paying $600/month for the type of plans I'm talking about, you are getting screwed. All I want is that people that can afford insurance not be a burden on those of us when they get sick. I actually first heard of this idea when Newt Gingrich talked about it a while ago. Why is this such a foreign concept to you?
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