Health care is one of those things that everyone should be entitled to.  I mean, who wouldn’t want to have all their medical expenses paid for and not have to worry about the cost of getting sick in America.  Now, when I say “cost of getting sick”, I don’t mean the opportunity cost of burning sick days, the cost your family members have to expend to take care of you and protect them, or the cost on your body; I simply mean the doctor or hospitals medical bill.

Having done some research on the current ideas floating around on capital hill, The Wall Street Journal Online has put together a rather nice collaborative table about the current plans.  I will post the link at the end of this post. Since this issue is probably one of the biggest facing our nation and the current administrations ledger, lets look at it in an everyday Socio-political aspect.

If anything is going to happen with health care reform, it is going to be a mix of the Senate proposed bill and the House bill.  At this point President Obama’s plan offered no specifics and unanswered questions, which leaves only the Senate and House bills as viable candidates.  What the government wants to do here is take the power out of insurance companies and give it to themselves.  Governments love to paint the picture of “greedy insurance companies” or “robber barons, thriving off of human suffering”, these claims are as bogus as a green sky and blue grass.  Insurance companies are like any other company, they provide a service to people that want them; you pay a premium every year and you receive benefits; most of these coverage’s are job sponsored.  If you do not like the service you can cancel it.  If you can afford X amount of dollars, you receive X amount in coverage; if you are wealthier and pay more, you receive more.  You choose your insurance companies and your doctors.

While it is unfortunate that there are those who cannot afford insurance; think of it from a business perspective: businesses do not give away free goods and services, in order for them to provide coverage for paying customers, everyone must pay; if people do not pay the company fails, if there is no company, thousands more would be worse off than the handful who couldn’t pay.

Another aspect of the Senate bill is that people who do not buy into this coverage (which by the way would cost a person around $8,000+ a year, and even more if you have a family) the government fines you at an accelerating rate.  In other words, they may fine you $1,000 this year, $2,000 the next year, $4,000 after that, so on and so forth.  Believe it or not, it will become a crime punishable by fees and fines to not have healthcare.  What ever happened to personal responsibility; people should be responsible for their actions.  If you want health care you can buy it, if not, you shouldn’t have to buy it.  Why would the government fine you for not buying insurance?

The answer is rather simple; as of now, the model goes something like this: we pay insurance companies, insurance companies pay doctors and medical bills on our behalf, doctors and pharmaceutical companies are compensated for their time and products through this transaction.  If the government enacts its plan, the shift moves away from the insurance companies (which remember are private companies that minimize cost and maximize revenue) to a government agency (runs on a budget and is not concerned with wasteful spending or cutting costs).  Therefore, the government would be paying the doctors and medical bills.  The agency set up to oversee these transactions would have a budget that is constantly increased over years detracting funds from other programs, thus requiring more money.  Where do they get this money?  Tax’s, fees, fines for not purchasing insurance, and out of your paycheck. 

The truth goes further than this.   Consider this scenario: Lets say you do not have insurance because you can’t pay the $8,000 a year the government mandates or you simply do not want insurance and one day you suddenly have a heart attack and are in the hospital.  Well now not only do you have to pay your hefty government fine, you also have to pay or at least try to pay your hospital bill.  So now the government in fact has profited from your illness through the fee and through your hospital bill; and you ended up paying more than if you had just paid your standard premium to an insurance company. 

What you can expect with this government program:

With a government model such as what they have proposed, they want to cover 94% of Americans.  This means that whatever you would be paying to the government, it would be increasing each year (unlike private insurance companies) coupled with more hidden fees and taxes to fund their mammoth program.  Since they are not a cost cutting model, they would have to increase the funding for the program, which means you would need to pay more.  You can also expect overcrowded hospitals, ridiculous lines, reduced hospital staff, and lower quality health care.

Let’s face the truth; Doctors make a great salary (most of it funded by insurance companies bought into by citizens at their own will and discretion).  With the government forcing this massive influx of patients on them, it would no longer be as profitable to become a Doctor.  Since the government would be paying the paychecks of these doctors, salaries would be decreasing and it would hardly be enough to cover medical school costs, and the insanely long hours they would need to work to cover all these patients.  With less competing Doctors and lower wages, the last thing that you could expect would be medical breakthroughs, research and development.  America’s health care quality would flatten and then downturn sharply at accelerating rates.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/st_healthcareproposals_20090912.html