It’s also a step towards a single payer system, which would actually do some good. For that reason alone I support this bill.
The current system allows them to do it. The HCR on the table makes changes that make these things illegal. Please, you should really inform yourself before taking a stance.
Charities can’t make a dent in the tens of millions of people who cannot get insurance. They also can’t make a dent in the millions of people who lose their health insurance every year. This option is a bizarre fantasy of yours, not a sensible policy.
Your donations are commendable. And utterly useless in the face of the wall of uninsured.
Then complain like a grown up. Face the issue with facts and intelligence. Argue the issue, not phantoms.
Yes it is. A man kicks open your door and is about to stab you. He is shot by a police officer. The government just saved you from a sudden, unexpected death. What if instead of man at your door, it’s a clot in your heart? It’s the same thing. Public safety and welfare is at issue either way.
You don’t understand the bill. The HCR on the table will still have private insurers. What do you mean “you don’t want to take part”? That’s gibberish, you will have whatever insurance you have now. If you don’t have insurance and don’t want it you will be taxed a penalty. This is to cover when you fall down the stairs and need pins in your femurs and can’t pay for it.
The ones who opt out only to save money are precisely the ones who should be refused coverage if something befalls them. This includes me. The debt becomes the responsibility of the person who did not pay into the system. Better or worse, rich or poor, that’s their debt and their legacy.
If I die in debt, the amount comes out of my assets, as it should. If they are insufficient, then debtors have recourse to pursue their funds.
If I was too poor to pay any of it? No tangible assets at all? Well, I guess that’s a point for you. Medicare does reimburse some bad debt to hospitals. So do some insurance companies. This gets absorbed into cost and passed on to the consumer. It’s already in place and already happening. It’s part of the gamble previously mentioned.
EDIT: You are also assuming that a large portion of us refuseniks will die penniless from some incurable disease. Not really a practical scenario.
I am fortunate in that I have access to health insurance through my employer. Even so, I have a choice of one insurer. A “boycott” would mean going uninsured.
I am hardly unique. The “boycott” concept is meaningless under the current system. If you boycott Hostess cupcakes, you can still enjoy Little Debbie’s. Boycott your insurance and you can end up broke or dead. Or both.
And right here is where your line of argument stops having any practical relevance to real-world scenarios for healthcare. Like it or not, our society is just not going to accept a strict no-pay-no-care system, where those who don’t have adequate insurance or assets are simply refused any needed care and left to die on the sidewalk if that’s how the chips fall.
No, we’re going to go on providing emergency and other treatments to people who need them whether they can pay or not, and hospitals and Medicare and insurers will (as you noted) go on eating the bad debt and passing its costs on to the paying customers.
And since that’s the way it is and will be, I see no practical reason to refrain from putting everybody into the same paying-customer risk pool right from the start. Sure, we’ll be spending some of the paying customers’ money on members of the risk pool who can’t pay, but we already do that anyway, and we’re not going to stop doing it.
We’ve put up with this unnecessarily expensive and inconvenient and inadequate system long enough, out of deference to the refuseniks’ short-sighted and unrealistic objections to a universal risk pool. Time to exercise a little pragmatism and stop catering to the refuseniks’ libertarian pipe dreams of every-man-for-himself health coverage.
No, I’m not. An opt-in system will spend buttloads of money caring for non-participants in a wide variety of circumstances. It won’t be limited to the rare instances when a principled refusenik happens to be simultaneously in dire need of care, unable to afford said care, and temporarily incapable of refusing said care.
:rolleyes:
I guess if you ran the court system, the Sixth and Eighth Amendments would be used to paper your parakeet’s page?
No, they’re there to keep the fifth, seventh and ninth amendments separate, silly.
Most likely not. Unless the wheel of fortune turns against you, and you must kneel before the Stalinist idol to protect your children’s health. Then you will kiss Obama’s Socialist ring in about two nanoseconds. And if you won’t, then you’re not worth the fat it would take to fry you.
The sixth amendment gives the right to counsel – does it give the right to lie to the court? To hide records and misrepresent? Cool!
The eight amendment forbids cruel and unusual punishment. In a country that waterboards people, and has indefinitely imprisoned people it knows to be innocent, my proposal violates that…how?
It sounds like a great plan to me. Let them rot in jail. Like one poster said, death panels?? We already have them.
Except, in the meantime, those people won’t receive care and may very well die. Most people don’t want to die, even if their families were promised $15M in exchange for their life.
Lets not be too hasty. Is it the families who decide? Does that “m” mean million? How about a nasty old man who thinks its funny to feed your dog Ex-Lax?
What a coincidence. The system that you just happened to grow up in turns out to be the kind of system that exactly matches your ideals!!
You know, it’s amazing how often that happens - people ‘just happening’ to have exactly the same guiding principles of the country they grew up in, regardless of whether those principles have any logical consistency - gaddamit, they’re right!
And it’s even more common amongst those having a poor education, a low intelligence, and yup, nationalistic nutjobs.
Congratulations, you’re everything we expected you to be.