Why the Health Insurance debate doesn't really make a lot of sense to me

My God.

You would have thought the earth was going to stand still in the last few months to hear our over the top politicians and their paid spokes-dogs going on and on about the health care debate.

Millions of people do not have jobs. Unemployment is at 10 % or better. Hundreds of thousands of people are losing their homes into bankruptcy and foreclosure and we are still fighting two wars in three countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq). Some of our military is on their 6th deployments overseas. Hillary! Bill ! Obama ! Reid ! Pelosi ! (oh, that’s right, it is all the fault of the republicans isn’t it….I forgot).

Bernie Madoff and his ilk stole 50 Billion dollars. Enron cost the economy 100 Billion dollars. Retirement accounts are turning to dust everywhere and the stock market has plummeted to the tune of a loss in the trillions of dollars in the last 24 months.

Yep, now was exactly the time the American people were going to get behind a new debate on health care in this country.

We have over 36 million illegal , undocumented aliens in this country. Every county , state and parish has had to lay people off. The state of California, which by volume is the world’s 5^th largest economy, was some 23 BILLION dollars in the red on the next state budget. Teachers are being laid off left and right, schools are being closed all over and if you can find a Mall or a shopping center that isn’t at least 20 % unoccupied , you are very fortunate. Toyota’s and Honda’s are falling apart as you drive them. Whole brands of cars are just being discontinued. No more Pontiac, no more Saturn, poof all gone. Hundreds of dealerships are being closed all over America and now was the time to explain how we needed a mandatory cost for health care applied to those people who didn’t have health care.

Look, this is how stupid this debate is and how bad the timing is to pursue this right now.

I cannot drive a car legally in the USA without car insurance. If I do and I get caught, I will lose my license. If I have an accident, I’ll lose everything I have. In my state that is the law and they check it electronically and could care less if you have an Insurance card. Even though they are that insistent about it, some 36 million people drive everyday in this country without Car Insurance. They do it and you have to buy “Uninsured motorist” liability coverage to make sure your own car gets fixed if you have an accident with one of these goofs. I pay for car insurance for years and years and years without ever using it, and if I do have an accident , I am thinking of how to pay for the claim out of pocket because I don’t want my rates to go up. For a product I’ve owned for years, paid into with no claims, and to worry about my rates going up the one time I use it is the pinnacle of stupidity. There is no effective regulation barring this practice, not a real one anyway. The only people these laws benefit are those that can afford a $700 per hour lawyer to sue them if they break the law.

The same stupid logic applies to Health Insurance. Insurance companies have to be multi headed monsters in order to sell their products in the USA because there is no universal law which allows one set of USA regulations to cover the policies that are sold. Every State (and sometimes counties) have regulations that are different in every place they do business. So in order to maximize their take from the policies they sell, they write exclusions into policies that minimize their risk. 20 years old, out of school ? Sorry, your parents cannot cover you anymore (unless you are in school, in which case, never mind, unless you are older than 25 then, oh yeah No Insurance!). Go to work at a new job in another state 31 days after you left the old job ? Uh, you have to wait 90 days to join our insurance group, unless of course you just retired from the military or are age 55 or older in which case special regulations may apply to you. Unless you have any kind of drug conviction or have had any kind of surgery in the past 3 years. 40 million people can’t afford health insurance because of how stupidly these regulations have been allowed to become.

What is the difference between a 21 year old in college and a 21 year old not in college that makes them automatically uninsurable by their parents through their policy anyway? The answer? Nothing except CLAIMS FREQUENCY. Colleges have clinics that cost less and people not in college incur Billing that is the same as everyone else.

I don’t even want to get into groups, rate plans, experience allocation or pre-existing conditions, which is a whole bigger barrel of fish by itself.

It makes me think what we ought to do when we get sick enough to see a doctor and don’t have health insurance is to ask a Mexican if he can help us get some fake identity papers so we can lay the bill of on somebody else or maybe we should get sick, get in our cars, drive the car through the emergency rooms doors and then cough and say “What happened I must have passed out?”, when someone runs up to the car , so the friggin car insurance has to pay for it.

Its better insured than most people are anyway.

I created a group on Facebook called “We are all tired of Bickering Politicians” , click the link to see it and feel free to join up. I’d love for one of these do nothing politicians to get an earful of you too !

Thankx for reading my rant !

bigmike