Ugh

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6 comments:

shafnitz said...

While I agree he's an idiot and doesn't seem to know what he's doing - as is, unfortunately, the case with many of our elected officials it seems (see: Guam-tipping-over-guy)- he's also probably frustrated from dealing with people attacking him on a regular basis. I'm not justifying his lack of knowledge, just his defensiveness.

Having said that, I don't think anyone in this video understands the real reason for requiring everyone to have health insurance. If you're going to tell insurance companies that they can't discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, you have to require everyone to purchase insurance. Otherwise people will wait until they need insurance before buying it and the entire system will fall apart. Insurance companies, obviously, wouldn't be able to function that way.

Boz said...

Everyone in this video is retarded. That guy is frustrated because they guys interviewing him are retarded. The guys doing the interview are frustrated because he's retarded. As with most political debates, the idea isn't to prove yourself right, but to prove the other guy wrong.

The current health care system sucks. The only time I've been to a doctor for myself in the past 7 years was for physical exams required by employers. I put much more money in the system than I get back, which is the way it's supposed to work for most people. As long as I know my insurance company will back me up if I get in a wreck or something, then I'm fine with paying for insurance.

You as a person are an investment for the insurance company. If you are the kind of person that goes to the doctor every week for a sore throat, they are not going to want to invest in you because you are a high risk investment. They know for a fact that you are going to cost them more money than you are going to give them. How can someone walk into an insurance company and say "listen, I will pay you $500 a month if you pay for my $30,000 operation that I have coming up next week." Of course the insurance company isn't going to want to take this guy.

If insurance companies are going to be forced to accept high risk investments, they will have no choice but to raise their rates. There's no other way around it. Someone, somewhere at some point is going to have to pay for it.

shafnitz said...

That's the reason they're going to be forced to accept everyone and everyone will have to buy insurance. It's supposed to balance things out so that it's not just high-risk people getting insurance.

The problem with the current system is, the insurance companies can do whatever they want without consequence. If a woman can't get insurance because they consider domestic abuse to be a pre-existing condition, something is wrong. And I guarantee that insurance companies' profits haven't skyrocketed the past few years because they've been playing fair.

Boz said...

so is the fee for not having insurance high enough to ofset the rise in rates? or are you still better off paying a fee every year and then only buying insurance when you need it?

evan said...

Boz nailed the problem on the head. The fee isn't high enough to make paying for insurance make sense financially. You can just go along paying the fee (which is less than the monthly insurance premium) and then start paying for insurance when you need it (and then cancel it again when you don't).

Why aren't the fees higher? I suspect that it would have been politically impossible to ram the bill through if the fees were high enough to actually make the thing make sense. So what we got is a half measure. Something that claims to require everyone to get insurance, but doesn't actually have the teeth to make it happen.

shafnitz said...

You're probably right. I guess it will remain to be seen. The fee is a lot higher than the one in Mitt Romney's 2006 bill in Massachusetts, but it's probably still not high enough.

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