And if his parents, for whatever reason, aren’t up to the job, then what? It’s his fault for picking the wrong parents?
As it happens, his parents did have insurance, but it didn’t cover all the costs of his necessary and life-saving care from infancy to teen years. By the time he was 20 he has maxed out the lifetime benefits of at least one health policy. On the other hand, between 20 and 40 he required almost no health care at all, so one might argue the initial investment paid off in someone with several decades of good health.
Oh please - your incessant “I don’t want to pay for that…!” is like fingernails on a blackboard.
How do you “prepare” for a birth defect?
Group insurance for children ends at a certain point - you don’t know that? Not to mention that maxing-out a policy sort of leaves you screwed for getting another.
We are both college educated. In his best years he earned 100K. In my best years I earned 50K. We have never been in debt, we never “popped out kids” (indeed, his birth defect rendered him sterile so we have no children), we never lived beyond our means. Most of the 20 years we’ve been married we’ve been covered by employer-sponsored insurance, but our recent 8 month gap has been… educational, to say the least.
It would take a hell of a lot of worry out of life.
When I lost my job in November of 2009 (not my choice - a lot of us were laid off) we also lost our health insurance as we simply could not afford the COBRA payments of $900 a month, nor were individually purchased policies an option as the premiums were higher. In fact, health insurance premiums would have exceeded the cost of food, housing, utilities, and transportation combined. We still paid hundreds of dollars a month for his medications, every month, until I found and got us onto a state program that heavily subsidizes the cost of private insurance. In other words, we found ourselves in this situation through no fault of our own, and yes, other taxpayers are subsidizing my husband’s care. Know what? I don’t give a damn. For 25 years I paid my taxes knowing that (oh, horrors!) they were paying, at least in part, for the food, housing, and care of the less fortunate of society and I didn’t mind that, either, because unlike you I always knew that one day I, too, might land on hard times and I wanted there to be a safety net in place if I did.
How would a UHC be different for us? Probably not much, right now. Except we wouldn’t have had 8 months without coverage were I dreaded what would happen if either one of us became ill or injured, when something as simple as a broken leg or bad flu could bankrupt us (you know, us responsible people who had never lived beyond our means).
I expect I will, eventually, get a steady paying full time job with insurance once again, but meanwhile, my part time, temporary, “not making a living at it” jobs that are keeping us in a home and putting food on the table will go to those necessities and not health insurance premiums. When that day comes, I will still an advocate of a UHC and yes, I will pay taxes for it. What you don’t seem to realize is that those taxes will replace health insurance premiums, so instead of giving the money to a private company you will give it to a government agency. In exchange you will get cradle-to-grave coverage that will never go away, is never dependent on your job or your status as able bodied/disabled. You whine about freeloaders, but yet you aren’t willing to pay for the government programs that benefit all of society and not just your selfish self. Responsible, adult people understand the need to pay taxes. They don’t like taxes, but they understand why they are necessary.
Does that mean the healthy will pay more than they receive? Yes. Don’t you realize that that is also the case with private insurance? In good years you pay more in premiums than you use, and that money goes not only to support the insurance company but to pay for the cost of care of those in the group who are sick or injured. Most will get better, then they will pay more in a year than they use which covers you when YOU get sick and need more care than you paid for in premiums in a given year. That’s how insurance works. The privately insured already subsidize the care for those who either can not or will not pay. In order for this to work you must have a large pool of people, most of whom are healthy at any given time, so enough money goes into the system to pay for those who need their benefits. The larger the pool the smaller amount each person has to pay in order for this to happen.
UHC is essentially expanding the pool to 300 million people. That’s a very large pool. Larger than the entire population of some countries that have UHC.
The fact is that if you have private insurance - and you do - you do NOT pay for the entire cost of your healthcare. Either you are subsidizing those who need more care than you, or drawing from the money paid in by others. The ONLY way you can say you are paying for your own care, truly, is to go without insurance and pay up front in cash - as I did for eight months. Funny thing, that - I could go into a doctor’s office and negotiate a 40-50% discount because I didn’t have insurance yet had the money to pay on the spot. I suppose one could argue the doctor was being generous, but I also required some medical testing that I obtained through a hospital and THEY are a business… who nonetheless knocked 50% off the cost of their services when I inquired about reduced rates for “self pay” patients able to pay the full cost at time of service. All of which makes me wonder if perhaps they aren’t doubling the cost of care to the insured to cover the indigent. You know, if that’s the case I’d rather have that up front and visible instead of hidden in the premiums charged by private companies, wouldn’t you?
Marketing expensive drugs like laundry soap is consumerism to the extreme. Most of the time the medication isn’t even covered by insurance.
