Posted by CB on June 08, 2010 at 17:06:12
In Reply to: Re: I'm Stoked posted by Pastor Don on May 17, 2010 at 19:38:47:
If you don't have insurance now, I pay for it every time you walk into a public hospital seeking emergency room services. If your employer doesn't offer insurance as a benefit or you choose not to buy coverage through your employer, I subsidize the cost of your care every time you go to the doctor and pay out-of-pocket. You may think you're paying the whole cost of your care, but you aren't. You've just shifted a significant portion of the cost of your uninsured medical care to those of us who buy insurance private coverage.
The "nanny state" is now requiring that everyone buy coverage, whether it's subsidized by your employer or by me, the taxpayer. Your employer may already be subsidized by corporate welfare, i.e., tax cuts for providing medical insurance. Now YOU, the ordinary citizen working for a small business, can qualify for subsizies that enable you to pay for private insurance premiums through employers who don't qualify for corporate welfare. In some cases, those subsidies are in the same form the large corporations get--tax cuts.
In any case, health insurance reform is the most colossal feed trough of corporate welfare for the private insurance industry that ever came down the pike. That's why the legislation passed--because significant group of rich, powerful business people stand to get richer as a consequence. It's another massive shift of public dollars to the private sector. I don't know why that should bother you--it's not something Queen Nancy Pelosi or the Dumbocrats invented. It is, in fact, the exact plan proposed by Republicans and conservatives in 1993 when the insurance industry shot down Clinton's attempt to pass universal coverage.
No one is getting a free ride except people with income so low they qualify for Medicaid, which is the only "public option" outside of Medicare. I'm assuming you plan to turn down Medicare after reaching age 65 or disability status. No need to depend on the nanny state when you can't get insurance through an employer, is there? Yeah, I know you paid into Medicare all these years, but that's a public health insurance program run by the nanny state. Don't go compromising your principles about the government deciding where your hard earned tax dollars should cover because you don't see Medicare for exactly what it is: an affordable public option. Do you know why Medicare even exists? Because there's no profit margin for the private insurance industry in covering the of old folks. You'll need a BOATLOAD of bucks if you want buy private insurance after you can no longer work. Unless, of course, you worked for a company subsidized by corporate welfare. That DOES include churches, because they don't pay taxes on their income.
Many of the folks with income low enough to qualify for Medicaid (the only "free ride" anyone will get in the nanny state) went bankrupt paying for medical care and the tax cuts that subsidize corporate welfare. In reality, the majority of people on Medicaid in my state are children. Over 50% of the children who were born in 2009 live in families with an income so low that they (the children, not their parents) qualified for Medicaid. I don't mind paying taxes so that the children of unemployed and low income parents can get basic care in a clinic or a physician's office. With health insurance reform, their parents now have a chance to buy affordable coverage. The nanny state is finally requiring them to pay into the system--imagine that! Why I should mind subsidizing private insurance options for low income people? I'm already subsidizing your private insurance through corporate welfare and your out-of-pocket medical expenses through what I pay annually in private insurance. Unfortunately, the actuarial math that supports what I'm talking about is a little more complicated that a sound bite designed to play on resentment and fear.
As far as free rides from the nanny state are concerned, children who don't have medical insurance end up costing me (a person who buys private insurance) and my employer (who gets NO corporate welfare) billions of dollars in skyrocking premiums by showing up in emergency rooms with illnesses like the flu. These illnesses are a heck of a lot cheaper and easier to treat in a doctor's office than an ER. The system of public hospital emergency services in the US are about to collapse from the burden of treating the uninsured. Don't believe me? Spend 24 hours volunteering in the social work department of public hospital before posting any more bigoted rhetoric about health insurance reform.