Health Insurance An Abused Concept

The basic concept of insurance is to provide immediate coverage that you will pay for, over the life of the policy. It is a zero sum game. The subscribers pay all costs insured as a group.

When someone says 45 million people don’t have health insurance, that is a misnomer, they are self insured. A self insured person is not going to visit three different doctors and have three blood tests as Obama suggests. But if you have health insurance, the health care system will rip your ass with three doctors and three blood tests. It might be long and drawn out, but it’s covered by your insurance. The doctors know how to ride this pony all the way to the bank.

Then there is liability and lawsuits. Most Congressmen started out as lawyers—hmmm. No reason to mess with liability limits, is there? Lawyers work on commission, don't they?

The irritating concept of this health care plan is the concept that 45 million people can’t pay for health care. Look at it this way, 300 million people can’t afford to pay for the coverage being promised. Will we ever really pay for it, or will it become part of our ever growing national debt?

The concept not perceived as real, is that health care treatments have progressed into an area to where the procedures due to their complexity are virtually unaffordable. A liver transplant can cost millions. Daily cancer injections can run $2,000 per shot and a premature baby 200K.

If you were to go out and buy a life insurance policy, a one million dollar policy might run you say $4,000 dollars per year. If you wanted a policy for 100k it should cost $400 per year. This concept is used with many different forms of insurance like Fire, Auto and Homeowners policies. The risks are predetermined and you pay accordingly. Notice you have the option to buy it; it is not forced on you. Insurance is a concept that allows you to cover now what you can pay for later, not what you can foist off onto government without the intent of every paying.

If you want to force insurance on someone, how about making it auto insurance. Over 50 percent of LA drivers have no insurance, “they can’t afford it.” Health insurance is a noble idea, but it is not a practical concept in a Democracy. Of course if you are talking Socialism, then there is no argument, we all deserve the very best. When you get to that point you are gaming the system. Medical treatment with new modern technology is not affordable for most of the human race and never will be. Our resources are finite, and government distribution of them, doesn’t make them go any further. People don’t go to medical school for 10 years just to work for the government; a high school education is all that's necessary.

The concept of living longer during retirement is now a very attainable goal. The idea of the world being populated by nothing but old farts chasing young tarts with a bottle of Viagra is a rather novel one. Modern medicine can enable us to live longer. We can die of other diseases later in life and rack up even more medical bills to boot (a catch 22). At some point we need to realize that socialized medicine puts an unfair burden on the young people just entering the work force.

This seems like a stretch for an article on the Great Depression, but we can’t afford the Medicare\Medicaid plan now in force for the old, coupled with Social Security. It is bankrupting us. It time to wake up and smell the financial ruin we are creating. There is no need to make the problem bigger.

We need health care and we need to be able to afford it as individuals. The government should keep out of this. If the government was to “Health Care” General Motors, we would all want BMW’s. In reality we’d pay for the BMW and end up getting something that would sound like a lawn mower and fail a smog test.