Can you elaborate on this feeling a bit more?
It seems either: recklessly irresponsible, strategically abusing the system when you’re healthy, or a made-up-statement-to-support-your-disposition to not want (government) health insurance
Likewise, if you were around at a time when automobile insurance wasn’t mandatory, did you not bloody want car insurance then, and how did that switch make you feel?
because it’s the **free market **, numbnuts. the greatest thing to ever grace humanity.
How does not paying the SOBs for doing nothing constitute abuse? It’s not as if they live up to some sort of promise to take care of your expenses later, when you’re sick. At the best, by that time you’ll probably have changed jobs and insurers anyway. At the worst, they’ll just find some way to weasel out of contributing even a single penny to your healthcare.
Go and ask the masses of people that don’t bother paying for car insurance how it’s strategic abuse.
Insurance is supposed to cover you for things that cannot be anticipated with any reasonable degree of certainty - it’s not a failure of insurance if you don’t ever have to utilize the insurance.
Now, you are right in that the weaseling-out when you’re genuinely sick is a problem - but that’s not supposed to be a problem with a government-run program - the type of program that Chopper would presumably “not bloody want”.
The “strategic abuse” part comes into play in that, typically when you’re destitute, while you undoubtedly suffer the extreme burdens of medical costs, you’re not suffering them alone. medicaid. bankruptcy courts. these all work in some ways to spread the costs of your irresponsibility to others.
same thing with opting out of health insurance when you’re presumably healthy and not anticipating medical expenses. if you guess right and don’t get sick, good for you but all the sick people’s insurance and medical costs now go up thanks to you not being part of the system (don’t get me wrong, though, the current way that we propose to force people to buy private insurance - not favorable to me). if you guess wrong and get sick, the (pathetic, meager, yet still extant) social systems that we have will ensure that some base level of medical care won’t be paid for by you alone.
I typed a ridiculously long-winded explanation of my medical history, reasoning, and a cost/benefit analysis and then deleted it - you don’t need that much info, particularly not in the pitt.
Stop with the car insurance comparisons, it’s not the same situation. My car insurance ensures that other people are protected from me. Health insurance is about covering personal costs. While deadbeats that don’t pay their ER costs are certainly a macroscopic factor, this argument doesn’t apply to me. I’ve paid my own way, even one regrettable ER visit.
Fiscally speaking, I’ve come out ahead buy eschewing insurance and paying out of pocket for my own care.
It comes down to this; I support health care reform but I don’t think UHC is a viable or even a desirable solution. I’d rather see tort reform, the separation of insurance from employment, tax-free HSA’s, and the ability to buy coverage across state lines or from Timbuktu if that’s what worked out best for me.
I think UHC is a lazy, ineffectual solution proposed and supported by people who are either naive or criminally stupid. I’ve no more to say on the subject.
So does the rest of the world not, like, exist to you guys or something?
So you’re not going to explain why our ineffectual, lazy (?) health care system keeps us going just fine? You’re not going to come back and tell me I’m too naive and stupid to understand that not being bankrupted by emergency surgery (a splenectomy, not a hypothetical) is a good thing?
Good.
No he’s saying that the rest of the world are naive criminals.
With shifty eyes. And they talk funny.
Did you know not all of them eat hamburgers or watch NASCAR? Freaks.
-Joe
Go back and read the whole post - he did explain to you, that he doesn’t think that current healthcare is working, and that the “solution” you all think you want will be ineffectual. Did you not understand what he meant by “I’d rather see tort reform, the separation of insurance from employment, tax-free HSA’s, and the ability to buy coverage across state lines or from Timbuktu if that’s what worked out best for me.”?
As for your not being bankrupted by emergency surgery, I still haven’t figured out why it is that so many people expect and demand that someone else pay their way in this life.
I was going to explain to you how forcing you to acquire 3rd-party liability for car crashes is even more restrictive on my right to operate as a free economic actor, or at least how it is extremely similar to forcing someone to buy health insurance, from a social cost perspective.
then i saw that your #1 proposal to fix our health care system is tort reform. so now i won’t - i don’t argue with dipshits who have their mouths over the insurance lobby’s dick.
It’s pretty much because they hate you.
Personally.
And they really, really want you to become destitute. That’s pretty much it.
Just a question. If real estate cost 1,000,000,000 per quarter acre, and thus you were completely unable to own land or even rent somewhere in this country, would you still sit with that look of intrigue on your face when people around you were trying to figure out a way to not squat in a landfill in a cardboard box?
creating social systems to render healthcare more affordable to each and every person is not “expecting and demanding that someone else pay their way in life”.
but if you truly believe that, get the fuck off of my taxpayer-supported roads unless you pay for the full construction costs of the road you use to get to work - it will be one less car to deal with at rush hour.
:rolleyes:
No, what I’m saying is that THAT IS WHY a lot of these programs are going bankrupt – the government has been borrowing from Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security funds to pay for other projects. (Mind you, this started with George H. W. Bush - NOT his son)
Likewise: (as that is just an old interview, but it does mention the information I gave)
How much Social Security money does the government borrow?
Social Security looms for next president
Yes, it mentions mainly Social Security, but that’s another big government program. And I can see the government borrowing from Medicare funds as well.
You aren’t very smart, are you?
You don’t appear to be all that smart either. Your real estate example makes no sense, and you appear to think that social systems are not costing our society anything, when the opposite is true. As for “your” taxpayer supported roads, I pay taxes to support them as well, so that analogy doesn’t work either.
The thing that you bleeding hearts don’t seem to get is that we already cannot afford the social programs we have now. And the more that the government pays for - the more that is paid for by taxes taken from the “haves” - the more dependent all of these “have nots” (you say) we have become, and the more they tend to expect. For example, can anyone explain to me why TV ads seem to think that it is expected that parents who are already struggling financially should go into further debt to put braces on their kids, or themselves? Braces are not a necessity. Neither are many of the things that private insurance cover, such as IVF, plastic surgery, etc.
I’m not American. I don’t think I want it, I have it. I like it. I I was expressing my happiness that someone who is not you wouldn’t be coming back to support his nonsense.
Of course I understood it. I wasn’t addressing it.
Really? Well you should add it to the list of things you can’t figure out then.
I’m led to believe she does not work, but suckles off the public teat.
You only pay an infinitesimal portion of the money spent building the roads you use. how is this not having someone else pay your way in life, literally?
and the land hypo is actually very apt: healthcare is a debate precisely because its current affordability is out of the reach of most wage earners in this country (and most people think healthcare is a good closer to water and housing than a drop-top bentley on the spectrum of “basic shit you need to have lead a decent life”). i bring up high land costs to see if you would still be a smug, smirking douchebag if 50% of your fellow members of society were unable to afford housing at prevailing wages? what about clean water?
we could probably afford it if we didn’t have to pay for the military to go on these “our dicks are bigger than yours” offensive wars that your ilk are so fond of.
but, of course, why listen to reasoned analysis. tax burdens in canada are not that much greater than they are in the US. the money you (well, apparently not you) spend on private health insurance, and the money the government hemorrhages in the form of tax breaks to private insurance (via tax deductions to the employer’s part of HI), if you took that and turned it towards a government-run program, while i don’t have the exact numbers, can’t be exactly that far off the current costs of healthcare.
and i can’t explain anything about braces because that was the most unintelligible thing i have read in the past 48 hours.
So, a long time ago, there was this guy, coulda done me a lot of good at no cost to himself, but was a prick? And later, life busted him up, and he landed in a place where he needed my help. So I did. The look on his face! Vengeance doesn’t get any sweeter than that, let me tall you! Jesus really knew what he was talking about, when it comes to payback.