One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.

by Little Miss Attila on December 15, 2010

Car insurance versus the individual mandate in the Healthcare Act.

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There Goes the...
December 18, 2010 at 1:59 pm

{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

I R A Darth Aggie December 15, 2010 at 12:09 pm

Wait for it…wait for it…wait…till they mandate you buy a Chevy Volt.

And Coca-Cola products.

And Bud Light.

And shop for clothes at LL Bean. Or Old Navy. Or maybe Nieman-Marcus.

And wait till they make you waive your 4th amendment rights to get your drivers license. Get pulled over, get groped, just like in the TSA line. Then have your car tossed for a search. In case you have narcotics. Or weapons.

I suppose if you have a van full of illegals, you’ll be sent on down the road.

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ponce December 15, 2010 at 12:42 pm

The mandatory insurance is required to save the insurance companies from having to insure people who wait until they get sick to buy health insurance.

I don’t think any libruls will care if the wingnuts get that provision shot down, but the capitalists sure will.

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retriever December 15, 2010 at 2:44 pm

Actually, ponce has a valid point. For all that many people in good health don’t want to buy health insurance and who (rightly or heartlessly, depending on your point of view) resent subsidizing the health care of people who smoke, booze, weigh too much, or do drugs and whose health care is costly to provide), the truth is that none of us can fully control our health. There is Someone in charge and we aren’t it. Most health conditions and medical disasters are a matter of genetics and seemingly random disasters, that people either prefer to engage in denial about (eg: despite a parent dying of cancer, reassuring oneself that one’s own organic diet will prevent), or else didn’t anticipate (a heart attack at 45 or a disabling car crash at 20 or being crippled by a stoned teenager in a stolen Camaro).

If you choose to go bare, without health insurance, you think you are making a good calculation based on what you presently know about your own risk, but actually don’t know it all. Of course, neither does that asinine BO, MO or their pack of jackal advisers. Or should I call them Punch, Judy and the Clowns? And when you then get sick, either you bankrupt your parents, spouse or any other relatives who get stuck with the bill for your care. Or you stick your neighbors/fellow citizens with the bill.

I knew a seemingly healthy young father who chose to go bare and who got a massive heart attack. Left him brain dead. The citizens of his state ended up paying out nearly half a million dollars while he was kept alive as a vegetable on life support for two years. Now some of us believe in the sacredness of life, even damaged, but by forcing people to buy insurance you are actually helping to spread the costs of THEIR OWN possible future care. And when people buy insurance and find that it cost more if they have “unhealthy” lifestyles, it usually motivates them better to lose weight or get blood levels better than lecturing from hypocritical harpies pacing around the White House.

It is just stupid when young people assume that they are healthy and nothing will happen to them. I used to be a chaplain on a neurointensive care unit. Guess who most of the patients were? Previously healthy young men, crippled or brain damaged, dying or crippled in motorcycle or car accidents, or injured in fights or hurt in gunfights (it was a bad city). I don’t mean to be belligerent, but life is uncertain, and it’s a bit like having your children innoculated. You don’t just do the latter for their sake, but for public health, to limit potential epidemics. John Donne once wrote that no man is an island.

Having said all that, I paid a fortune when I was young and healthy for private health insurance because my worrry wart family made me, and I often think longingly of all the money I would have saved up by now if I had invested those thousands instead of forking them over to an insurance company…..But my family were adamant that they didn’t want to lose their house if I got sick, and that it wouldn’t be ethical of me to become a ward of the state, so I forked over my money to the fat coffers of Blue Cross…

Since I am sick as a dog with strep right now, and feel like something the cat dragged in, I am perhaps thinking like a wussy liberal tonight instead of a Fierce Brave Conservative…:)

Perhaps if one were a total wuss and did nothing at all dangerous in one’s daily life, one might take a calculated risk and go bare until one married and had kids?

I am not normally fond of government telling people what to do, but one reason why car insurance IS a good idea is that we all engage in denial all the time. Of course, these days, my car insurance rates go up continually because of uninsured illegals who hit and run (because they would get deported if they stayed around to get written up) or truckers (who presumably don’t want to get written up because of warnings from management). Increasingly I feel like a rube for paying for insurance while others get away without it, but get their care in the ER, paid for by my taxes. But I am digressing.

So long as hospitals turn no one away, and citizens get stuck with the bill for people who refuse to get insurance (like illegals or those who can’t or won’t get insurance), you probably should force people to at least carry catastrophic coverage. Maybe anything over $5000. Not covering ordinary expenses, just to spare the taxpayers.

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epador December 15, 2010 at 5:53 pm

There is a big difference between catastrophic coverage, chronic care and health maintenance.

Yet the current health care reform “insurance” lobs them all together and requires folks to buy it.

The metaphor breaks down very quickly. Does your car insurance cover oil changes? Windshield wipers? Car washes? Does it require what kind of gas you buy to put in your car? Tell you what oil you can put in it and how often you can change it? Of course not. But US health insurance DOES pay for preventive care, dictates what medications and procedures it will or won’t pay for, etc.

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Little Miss Attila December 15, 2010 at 9:49 pm

When I was struggling in my early days in publishing, I couldn’t afford health insurance. If I’d bought it I wouldn’t have been able to eat. Literally.

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retriever December 16, 2010 at 5:37 am

Please excuse lengthy rant above, obviously you can’t force people to buy something they can’t afford as LMA has sensibly reminded us. (Shouldn’t write when I’m sick). And who am I kidding, the illegals still won’t pay into the system. So it will never be fair. When my spouse was out of work for years, we had to pay retail for our care and get ripped off for outrageously expensive private catastrophic coverage while Certain People got it for free. The final kicker was when our local hospital tacked on a 25% surcharge to our bills “for the uninsured” that we had to pay. So they could play “Lady Bountiful” with our money…the only reason we were able to was that we had savings left from when spouse had been a Wicked Capitalist Oppressor (yeah!)

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