The weird thing is that the individual mandate was a Republican idea back in '93. Some of the very congresspeople who are now calling it unconstitutional were, in fact, the ones who came up with and cosponsored the original bill that included it.
Democrats were against it then. They compromised on the employer-based system we have now. (Heh. Compromise across party lines. Remember that? And MTV played music. And Windows was a functional shell built around a solid command-line interface.)
Candidate Obama campaigned against the individual mandate, and says he was dragged into supporting it "kicking and screaming."
Funny how just about everyone has reversed position on the issue.
It's sticky. I don't like the idea of forcing people to buy insurance. But 40k people die every year in this country because they aren't insured. And the crippling cost of health care is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy. So there is an argument to be made that everyone should have it.
Obama's point was that the system wouldn't work without the mandate. You need everyone in the pool in order to bring premium costs down.
The funny thing for me is that I support single payer. I hate for-profit insurance. What good does it do? They're just acting as middlemen, and they're taking cuts from all sides. They jack up premium rates, do whatever they can to avoid paying claims (including deliberately building up obscene amounts of red tape and purposeful incompetency), strong-arm doctors ("reimbursing" them sometimes at - or even below! - cost), and then turn around and charge crippling premiums for malpractice insurance. And they're making huge amounts of money doing it. Money that's ostensibly being spent on health care (which accounts for 1/5th of our GDP and rising) but is being taken out of the system to pay insurers.
We'd be much better off with a publicly-run system. Government bureaucracy isn't great, but at least they're not actively trying to screw you over for fun and profit.
But when you stop to think about it, single payer implicitly includes an individual mandate. It's just that it would be paid for in taxes rather than to insurance companies. (But I'm convinced the cost would be lower.)
The mandate, by the way, doesn't say that you must buy insurance. It says that there's a tax penalty if you don't. But that penalty is less than the cost of insurance premiums. The figures I've seen for the annual tax penalty were comparable to what I'm paying now every month. (And the penalty is waived if your household income is below a certain threshold. So you're not punished if you can't afford it.)
And the thing is... it's only fair. Because the uninsured put a drain on the system. Emergency rooms are clogged with people who are using them as clinics rather than coming in with actual emergencies. And those costs get passed on to the rest of us. Partly through taxes that subsidize the hospitals so they can stay afloat while running the ERs. So if you can afford insurance and are choosing not to get it, why shouldn't you be taxed extra to help carry that burden?
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Date: 2010-03-26 06:16 pm (UTC)Democrats were against it then. They compromised on the employer-based system we have now. (Heh. Compromise across party lines. Remember that? And MTV played music. And Windows was a functional shell built around a solid command-line interface.)
Candidate Obama campaigned against the individual mandate, and says he was dragged into supporting it "kicking and screaming."
Funny how just about everyone has reversed position on the issue.
It's sticky. I don't like the idea of forcing people to buy insurance. But 40k people die every year in this country because they aren't insured. And the crippling cost of health care is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy. So there is an argument to be made that everyone should have it.
Obama's point was that the system wouldn't work without the mandate. You need everyone in the pool in order to bring premium costs down.
The funny thing for me is that I support single payer. I hate for-profit insurance. What good does it do? They're just acting as middlemen, and they're taking cuts from all sides. They jack up premium rates, do whatever they can to avoid paying claims (including deliberately building up obscene amounts of red tape and purposeful incompetency), strong-arm doctors ("reimbursing" them sometimes at - or even below! - cost), and then turn around and charge crippling premiums for malpractice insurance. And they're making huge amounts of money doing it. Money that's ostensibly being spent on health care (which accounts for 1/5th of our GDP and rising) but is being taken out of the system to pay insurers.
We'd be much better off with a publicly-run system. Government bureaucracy isn't great, but at least they're not actively trying to screw you over for fun and profit.
But when you stop to think about it, single payer implicitly includes an individual mandate. It's just that it would be paid for in taxes rather than to insurance companies. (But I'm convinced the cost would be lower.)
The mandate, by the way, doesn't say that you must buy insurance. It says that there's a tax penalty if you don't. But that penalty is less than the cost of insurance premiums. The figures I've seen for the annual tax penalty were comparable to what I'm paying now every month. (And the penalty is waived if your household income is below a certain threshold. So you're not punished if you can't afford it.)
And the thing is... it's only fair. Because the uninsured put a drain on the system. Emergency rooms are clogged with people who are using them as clinics rather than coming in with actual emergencies. And those costs get passed on to the rest of us. Partly through taxes that subsidize the hospitals so they can stay afloat while running the ERs. So if you can afford insurance and are choosing not to get it, why shouldn't you be taxed extra to help carry that burden?