Mandates and Handouts: Insurance doesn’t need a bailout.

There is a LOT of talk about the need for health care reform. I’m covering more of that in my up coming post on “General Welfare” in the US. I want to address two specific ideas that, in my opinion are inseparable: The Personal Mandate and the Public Option.

A mandate is essential to insure that we turn away from sick-care back to health-care; that people take their whole well being seriously and don’t let things get to a crisis point before seeking medical attention. This will insure that people are paying their premiums, even when they feel find, thus helping pool more money into the general fund to bring down premiums and deductibles. In theory.

The thing is that what it actually will do is hand hundreds of thousands of new customers over to a system that has no interest in helping anyone get better. The idea of pooling money to limit the risk and the cost is also not a new concept; that’s what the FICA tax is, and pretty much all taxes, for that matter. We pool our resources, giving them up to the government to manage and take care of things that we all want, but wouldn’t want to manage ourselves. Things like libraries, roads and Health Care.

We have the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. We have Medicare and Medicaid. We have government run health insurance. The whole logic of the Personal Mandate clearly states that if the public had the option to buy into Medicare, and thus had a not-for-profit, Public Option, that this would mean improvements to Medicare, by way of having more income from younger, healthier individuals.

On the other hand, demanding that we purchase Private Health care Insurance, from the companies that have led us to the ruin we are in, is like trying to mandate that we all subscribe to NetFlix or Blockbuster, whether or not we watch movies; it is like telling people who don’t ship things that they need to pay a monthly fee to Fed-Ex or UPS while restricting use of the USPS to a small segment of the population. The idea that there is no non-profit, public option is insulting and, quite possibly, unconstitutional. I promise that this will be the first challenge we see to the new bill, if it passes under the current plan.