The Price of Existence

It sounds like a noble concept: “universal healthcare”. Everyone gets the medical attention they need. What could be wrong with that?

A few statements to start:

First, in the U.S., we aren’t talking about universal health care, we’re talking about universal health insurance. There is a huge difference, make no mistake.

For years, this country did have universal health care; doctors and hospitals were available to anyone if they were needed, and you paid them for services rendered when and if you used them. It wasn’t until the early 70’s and the Nixon administration that health insurance really took off.

Now we speak of “health care” and “health insurance” as if they are synonymous. They are not.

Second, there are (at least) two main reasons why our current healthcare system is broken and cannot be “fixed” in it’s present state:

1) It is a “for profit” system. Insurance companies make money by collecting premiums. They do not make money by paying claims. If claims start cutting into profits, they will either raise premiums or deny claims or both. They do not care about you; they care about getting your money. Period.

2) People expect to get something for their money. Nobody wants to waste money. People pay thousands and thousands of dollars into their “healthcare plans” every year. Is it any wonder why they take themselves or their children in to the emergency room for every sniffle, cough, ache or pain? They’ve paid for it; they want to use it, even if they don’t really need to. Having insurance encourages people to use it as much as they can, and as the claims go up, so do the premiums.

Knowing that, it’s interesting (but no surprise) that our “fix” for healthcare is to make it bigger; to expand it so that everyone has to be a part of it whether they want to or not. The following article is a couple of weeks old; I just haven’t gotten around to addressing it. You can read it in it’s entirety, but the title really says all you need to know:

Senate bill fines people refusing health coverage

“Mandatory insurance” is not a new concept. It’s mandatory that we have insurance to drive a car. It’s mandatory to have insurance if we have a mortgage on our home. But this is different, because in all other cases, the insurance is mandatory only because we chose to do something that we didn’t have to do (drive a car or borrow money for a home, for instance).

This insurance would be mandatory on everyone simply because we exist.

Think about that for a moment. Think hard.

If we can be forced by law to be a part of a system against our will, can we also be forced to do whatever that system tells us we must do?

Logic says that if the uninsured are being forced to participate in mandatory insurance because they are a “burden” on the rest, then everyone will be forced to do what we are told by this healthcare system for the same reason. And, like the system itself, you won’t have choice in the matter.

Vaccines, drugs, exams, blood; whatever we are told to do, we could be forced to do, whether we wanted to or not.

We need to understand that once we give up control of our lives, they no longer belong to us.