Mandatory health insurance. What a crock. It should be an option, a right. Not a mandate.
Why shouldn’t it be a mandate? If you can’t guarantee that you won’t be going to a hospital for emergency care and can’t afford it, or if you can’t guarantee that you won’t declare bankruptcy because of your health care bills and fuck over everyone else you owe money to, why shouldn’t you mandate health insurance?
Fining people that don’t have health insurance = going too far. It should be a choice, regardless of the financial consequences of that choice.
I can’t guarantee that I WILL be going for emergency care or bankruptcy either. Regardless, I have health insurance, I just think that in principle it should not be a requirement.
I never said it was a good idea to choose not to have health insurance. However, I would argue that it should be a choice.
The government has invaded my life enough already. They don’t need to make good choices for me.
Some would argue “well why outlaw abortion or rape, then, isn’t that a government invasion?” - I understand the point behind such a question, but we aren’t talking about a choice that causes a criminal/murderous act. Such laws are in place to keep murder and horrendous things from happening, or at least punish those who do them. Regarding insurance, we are talking about a choice that is mostly personal.
Do I want a Whopper or a Chicken Sandwich? It sounds like I’m devaluing it, but analogously it’s that kind of choice. The government shouldn’t force me to eat healthy food, so why should it force me to get health insurance? They are both life choices that don’t directly involve other lives in a threatening way (other than financially)
You do get a choice. You get to choose the health insurance you want. or like most people, you get the health insurance your employer buys for you. so there is your whopper or your chicken sandwich.
An injured or sick person has to be paid for somehow. the argument that I shouldn’t have to purchase insurance if i don’t want to. I CHOOSE to be a burden on society should something bad happen, is foolish to the extreme, unless you have so much cash on hand as to be able to cover an event.
Not being insured is a macro horrendous event. It is bankrupting hospitals and making the United States as a whole operate at an unnecessarily high cost.
This would be different if we lived in a society where it is acceptable for people to die for not having care. but we don’t. if hospitals and doctors were allowed to not treat patients who wouldn’t provide them with a profit, then your arguement would be sensical.
Well, this will be my last point.
It is not our fault these days that we can’t afford healthcare. That’s the underlying problem to all of this.
I completely understand your point that it bankrupts people and hospitals and causes problems when people don’t have health insurance, which is why I have it and understand the reasoning behind the mandate. It certainly helps the symptoms of our problem, but not the root cause.
However, you are not fixing the problem by mandating health care, you’re just changing the problem. No one is actually addressing the cost issue. We’re just changing who pays for it. You fix healthcare by making healthcare affordable. Then we would be able to afford healthcare and we would be able to afford those moments in which maybe we don’t have insurance.
When it costs $1000’s a day to stay in a hospital room, the problem isn’t the insurance, it is the hyper-inflated cost of healthcare, which the current healthcare bill does not address in any direct manner. It only addresses the cost of insurance. The cost of healthcare itself needs to come down. No wonder insurance companies DON’T want to pay for procedures! We blame the insurance companies, yet they are paying $100/hour for us to stay in a hospital room, no wonder they are hesitant.
I’m just mostly pissed that the healthcare bill will do nothing to fix the root of the problem. Healthcare costs will continue to skyrocket, as they have done in Massachusetts.
We live in a day where we completely rely on insurance to take care of us medically. THAT is what needs fixed. It shouldn’t be this way.
There is simply no better way of explaining my own personal objections to the proposed health care reform other than the words immediately above this.
