Fix Fenders not People!

Interesting:

Matt Friedeman Show – 10. PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS President Obama has repeatedly said that “no insurance company will be allowed to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition.” That sounds wonderful until you apply common sense, which is in short supply in Washington. What if we made a law that allowed you to buy car insurance after you got into an accident and that required the insurance company to pay for the damage? Wouldn’t many people just wait for an accident before buying insurance? Why wouldn’t many Americans wait until they were sick to buy health insurance?

Amanda Terresi of Liberty on the Rocks (which I wrote about last week)
The idea is that it is health insurance. The concept of insurance is that you get it before you become sick or before something happens to you. It is equivalent to not having any car insurance, hitting a tree, and calling Geico and saying you want to sign up.

OK, so same playbook, different voice. Both arguments against allowing pre-existing illness to be covered are based on these illnesses driving up the costs for everyone. OK, that is a fact, but should not be a concern. The idea behind health care reform is to have everyone covered. The viewpoint expressed by this little “c” christain and liberty only libertarian is that coverage should be denied for anyone that would drive up the cost for them.

So my question to these two individuals and anyone who shares their view, is this. If we do not include them, how will they receive care? This attitude of “well it sucks to be you” is not one that I find flattering, especially with all the horn tooting and drum banging about how much of a Christian nation we are. We have put our heads in the sand and ignored the elephant in the room for too long. Why? Because if it does not directly affect me, I can ignore it.

It is true, that no one dies in the gutter, so why all the fuss to change it? Because the way care is delivered is after the fact (people wait too long) or it is through emergency room which are mandated to provide care and either close or pass on the cost to the state and to us with health insurance. My point is – we already pay now for those not insured.

OK, my views are a bit biased because I am a public health graduate. I have bought into the idea that a healthy society is a more productive society and is better for my health and family overall. But health care is a business and those that now control it do not want to see any change in what is a pretty lucrative for them. In the mean time, lack of universal care causes treatable illnesses to go unchecked, decreases entrepreneurship, forces families into bankruptcy, or forces one to forgo care to provide for other members of the family.

Our current system sucks. Stop fighting it all out and require that it cover all (everyone in – everyone pays), is not dependent on an employer or having a job, and meets a level of care agreed upon by those in the know (based on science – not marketing or hype). Other countries do it and do it well. Why we don’t is based mainly on our greed, the “why should I give up and/or pay for those that have not secured it for themselves?” Which is then supported by the attitude of “It sucks to be you?”