Health Insurance

We are currently in a situation in this country where we have two groups, the haves and the have nots. The haves are the people who have adequate health insurance. The have nots are those who don't. Now, the number of haves is not as large as they think they are as this article in the New York Times illustrates. Health insurance comes in many flavors, some will protect you and some won't.

We are currently trying to decide if the Government should provide health insurance to all the uninsured citizens. In effect it already does, the only thing being that before you can get Government health insurance you have to turn over all your assets to the hospitals so you qualify as poor, or, you have to be old enough to get Medicare.

Now this idea that we should have a system that bankrupts certain people for getting sick, is terribly expensive for everyone and provides a varying level of care depending on how much money you have or where you live seems popular with a lot of people. They argue that if we tried to fix it it would cost trillions of dollars and drive up taxes.

Well, lets face it, someone is already paying for all the health care provided. It is possible that if everyone had health insurance more people might use the benefits thereby increasing demand and driving up costs, but that may actually end up preventing more expensive illnesses caused by not getting preventative care. However, either way, the money for health care is coming from the economy somehow.

No one wants to eliminate choice, however, it might be the Government's obligation to prevent scams and cons being perpetrated. So, suppose the Government simply qualified those who offered adequate care and then allowed all citizens to pick one of the policies? This would require that all money currently used to pay for health insurance be transferred to the Government and it would still allow people to have supplemental insurance to cover things like deductibles and co-insurance or preferred care (i.e. private rooms) but it would preserve our current system and allow choice while assuring all health insurance offered met some pre-determined standards.

Now, there would have to be taxes to cover the cost of this, but health insurance would no longer be a cost of doing business, except of course that it would be a tax for all, and it level the playing field for everyone doing business here.

If you don't think we can afford to do this, I would argue that as a society we are morally obligated to pay for it and I think the time has come. I actually think that a system constructed properly will have a net reduction in cost, but that is an argument that ignores the moral obligation.