Health Insurance Can’t Be Optional
In Mass, everyone has to have health insurance by January 1. Their new universal health insurance system has expanded government coverage options and driven down the price of private insurance with government subsidies and state collaboration with health insurance companies. But everyone has to sign up. If they don’t they’ll face tax penalties starting next year. Mass. residents who are uninsured as of December 31 2007 will lose their personal exemption - worth $219 - when they file taxes in the spring. And if they continue to lack health insurance into 2008, they will be taxed 50% of the price of the least expensive health insurance plan available, with the charge estimated to be about $150/month.
Critics are calling foul, and saying that the mandate that everyone must have insurance is too much government intervention. But the state has already expanded government health insurance so that more people qualify, and lowered the price of private insurance; this can’t just be a one-way street. The citizens have to step up too. And unfortunately, without some sort of legal or financial penalty, there will always be people who don’t consider health insurance to be a priority. They earn too much money to qualify for government-funded health insurance, but they would rather spend it on something other than health insurance. These people may be very healthy, and since they have never had a need for health insurance in the past, they assume their good luck will continue. Then when something happens and they need medical care, they invariably end up in the emergency room without health insurance. And when they don’t pay their medical bills (because they can’t, since most of us would be completely out of luck if we had to come up with $200,000 or even $20,000 out-of-pocket for a medical expense), hospitals raise rates to compensate for the bad debt, and insured patients foot the bill.
Liability auto insurance is mandatory just about everywhere in the US. The logic is that if you cause an accident, you have to pay for the damages incurred by the person you hit. Since most people don’t have significant sums of money sitting around for this purpose, we’re all required to carry liability insurance, and thus a guarantee that the expenses for damage we cause with our cars will not be passed on to the victim. But we’re not required to carry comp/collision insurance unless the car is still being financed, because it’s up to each of us to decide if we want to insure our own vehicle. Both critics and proponents of mandatory health insurance requirements liken their position to auto insurance laws. In an overly-simplified explanation, critics might say that nobody is required to carry comp/collision insurance on a vehicle that they own outright, and thus nobody should be required to have health insurance on themselves.
But the logic is flawed. If you wreck your car and don’t have insurance to repair or replace it, you will have to figure out another way to get around. Unless you have a rich uncle, nobody else is going to fix the situation for you. And if you choose to drive without insurance on your own vehicle, you know that the worst-case scenario is a total loss - equal to the value of your vehicle. This is not the case with liability auto insurance (you might hit an H2 and a Lexus at the same time, or you might hit a pinto, you never know). And it is also very much not the case with health insurance. Your claim could be for a few hundred dollars to remove a funny mole, or it could be for $300,000 when a persistent headache turns out to be a brain tumor.
If you end up having emergency surgery without health insurance, the bill is going to be hefty, and more often than not, the hospital is going to get stuck with it. And those of us with health insurance will in turn pay higher premiums. Everything has a price. And whether Colorado wants to move to a single-payer universal health care system, or a system similar to what they have in Mass, with a combination of government coverage and private coverage, there has to be a requirement that everyone be covered. That is the only fair way to spread the risk and cost to the greatest number of people. We all have to pay for this, either through taxes or health insurance premiums. There is simply no way to guarantee that a person is never going to need health care, so there is no way that anyone should be able to opt out of health insurance.
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So much for living in the land of the free. Freedom comes with a certain responsibility for choices whether they are poor or not. It is not the state’s responsibility to intervene for an individual’s own good. That is essentially like living in a Communist state. So a person doesn’t have insurance - that doesn’t mean they necessarily forgo medical care until dire circumstances dictate it. That is a myth that is constantly being perpetuated by the left.
Health insurance does NOT guarantee better health care. All it does is enrich the the coffers of stockholders. Most of these “affordable” plans don’t provide any better coverage than having no insurance in the first place.
Do you also disagree with the law requiring you to carry liability coverage on your auto insurance? Don’t say that is a different subject either.
So you don’t have health insurance. Your grand plan is to just put the money into a savings account and expect that to be enough? If you had something happen tomorrow and needed a $400,000 brain surgery, would you expect the hospital not to treat you if they didn’t think you’d be able to pay? That is the freedom that should be afforded a hospital doing business in a free country. The fact is that nearly all people without health insurance that get a large hospital bill declare bankruptcy and skip out on the bill. They all had the same grand plan that you do.
I’m sure you’ll have no problem thinking of yourself when it does happen to you. You’ll have no problem passing the bill onto the more responsible people in society to pay because you’ve got an excuse. All the leeches in this country have an excuse why they need to be a leech.
ForHealth, I think you missed the whole point of my article. It’s true that the government shouldn’t be enacting rules that force us to do things that are strictly for our own good. But if you are uninsured, and collapse in the middle of a park while having a heart attack, people are going to call 911. Paramedics are going to take you to an emergency room, and doctors are going to try to save your life. In a situation like that, you might not even be conscious during the treatment. They aren’t going to be asking you for proof of insurance. And if you declare bankruptcy afterwards, the hospital has to write off the debt. Then they raise the prices they charge, and those of us who do have insurance end up paying more. So having health insurance doesn’t just help the insured. And not having it doesn’t just hurt the person who chooses to go without. It’s a financial drain on everyone else who does pay for health insurance.
Massachusetts initiated a new universal health insurance system using a combination of incentives and penalties to get citizens to sign on. Massachusetts residents who are uninsured as of December 31, 2007 will lose their personal exemption – worth $219, when they file taxes in the spring. If they continue to lack health insurance into 2008, they will be taxed 50% of the price of the least expensive health insurance plan available. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal in February 7, 2008, only half of the previously uninsured currently enrolled; and no less than 20% did not qualify for subsidies and were granted exemptions because the costs were too much of a hardship (note the per capital money income of Massachusetts is reported as $25,952 for 2006). One lesson we could learn from here is that, in spite of government intervention, the cost of health care coverage in the U.S. could still be unaffordable. In the real world, it is difficult for us to acquire something that is not affordable. On the other hand, I would agree that health care coverage cannot be universal without a mandate, which may result in garnishing someone’s wage for failing to obtain health insurance coverage. Using the liability auto insurance as a parallel to present the logic of a mandatory health care insurance coverage for every U.S. citizen may not gain broad support because U.S. citizens have a choice of not owing an automobile.
The issue of affordability arises from the fact that everything has a price. Massachusetts’ mandatory health care insurance is costing the government about $158 million today, and is projected to reach $1.35 billion by 2011. On the other hand, Massachusetts is expected to incur a $1.2 billion budget deficit in 2008. To balance the budget in 2011, some other areas of government services, e.g. education may have to face deep cuts, or the tax needs to be raised. The current economic slow down will not help increase government revenue without new taxes. I believe health care reform in the U.S. will take a gradual approach, and it is going to be built upon the system we already have. In a few year’s time, we will learn from the Massachusetts experience, what are the facts and myths of a universal health care system - its promises, the cost of delivering the promises, and the effect on people providing the health care services.
Nov 21st, 2007 at 1:18 am
[...] Let’s keep in mind the nature of most people when it comes to taking care of not-so-pleasant tasks - procrastination is pretty common. All of us in the health insurance industry are used to getting calls on the 28th of the month, from a client who desperately needs a policy in effect by the first of the next month. I would imagine that in the next seven weeks, quite a few of those 100,000 people will get insurance. And if they don’t, they’ll be paying higher taxes in 2008. [...]