The keystone of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is that all people must buy insurance. In the future, you will not have people that didn't have insurance for 30 years and now want it. It will fix that problem by making everyone pay insurance.
I wonder how many other problems of personal responsibility could be fixed by mandating under threat of either taxation or jailtime that people change their habits?
As of now, the way the bill stands as far as I understand it, you aren't really "forced" to buy it. You would simply pay a penalty for not having insurance.
I don't know about any of you, but I have every intention of /not/ paying for insurance and just paying the penalty every year. What does it matter, if insurance companies can't turn you away for pre-existing conditions, and can't raise premiums past a ceiling?
What they're in essence doing is begging me to not pay for insurance until I get some serious illness, and then just go and get some insurance when I need it, when insurance companies would normally turn me away (and they should).
The same is true for preexisting conditions - if you aren't required to buy healthcare, no one will buy it until they are standing in the ER. That is why everyone must buy the healthcare now. Say what you want about rights, the constitution, etc - this plan will fail if not everyone buys insurance.
I guess to me the plan is a failure, so it's success...is just more failure to me. Just a failure of the right to our own responsibility.
If people shouldn't be forced to buy insurance, we surely shouldn't control peoples' exercise and eating habits. That is an unarguable infringement of their rights. However, insurance companies already reimburse people that go to the gym. If I work out 50 times in 6 months, I get a check for a few hundred bucks. I wonder if the same could be done for smoking, drinking, etc, but again the same argument about human rights comes up.
Exactly! I didn't mean at all that people should be taxed for enjoying their bad habits. I think that's a pretty egregious use of government coercion, and I said it more to illustrate how ridiculous any of this is.
I'm a Libertarian, and a morose one at that. What I want is to be left alone, and to be allowed to enjoy both the fruits of my labor, and the consequences of my stupidity.
I want to be allowed to decide for myself what to purchase, and not be forced to pay for something that I don't want to use.
I want to be allowed to decide what I put into my own body, because I think there's little difference between the illegal and the legal drugs (except, I suppose, that alcohol is far more dangerous than the vast majority of illegal substances). No...no, thank you, my kind benevolent tyrants. I /don't/ need you to threaten prison time if I smoke weed. The influence of my social circles and local community is a far better method of keeping kids off drugs. Beyond that, who cares if adults use? It's their body, let them abuse it however they want. As the great Dr. Hendrix (PhD in shredding) once said, "I'm the one who's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to".
I want to stop being punished for taking responsibility for myself, and stop seeing situations where people "need" to go out and buy a new TV and new living room furniture, because they have too much in the way of liquid assets for them to get government aid. So...the solution is to waste the money and take mine!? No...I think not. This isn't some abstract scenario, either, this was a situation faced by my wife not a week ago (she sets people up with supplemental plans for medicare, and adjusts their current government plans)
the problem we Libertarians have is being in a society where people think it's never okay for anyone to suffer, and anyone else's suffering necessitates both government and community intervention. I disagree. I think life isn't fair, and everyone should play the cards they are dealt.
A lot of people think that's callous and heartless, but I'm not either of those. I simply think that private charities with infinitely more oversight, and far more efficient than government bureaucracy do a much better job of taking care of people, and can do it with less money, and do a better job of eliminating the leeches.
I suppose it's a bit of a pipe-dream at this point. If people at large were actually subjected to the consequences of their stupid decisions, there would be a mortality rate the likes we haven't seen since the black plague. A friend of mine refers to this period as "chlorinating the gene pool". A bit crude, I admit, but at any point in a civilization, will it
ever be okay to allow the motivated innovators rise, and let the people who specifically work to accomplish nothing fall? This isn't cruel, it's simply life, and I don't think that every measure should be done to equal all playing fields, because some of them have a disparity due to the individual's motivations and nothing more.
When you punish hard work, people work less hard.
When people realize they can vote themselves benefits for a treasury they don't contribute to, a democracy begins to fall.
This is a long rant, I know, and I may have gotten off topic. Long story short, after seeing things like Project MKULTRA (look it up, great stuff!) and other ways the federal government has done everything in their power to con and manipulate it's constituents, I have lost all trust in them. It has a bit to do with having absolutely no oversight, and a bit to do with being lied to over and over. I've yet to see a well-run department of the government, and would prefer it if they kept their stingy little greedy little corrupt little hands out of my life, off of my paycheck, and out of my health decisions.
As far as decreasing the cost of health care? I think that's a huge issue, and something not to be ignored. I wish I knew more of the reasons behind it, but I have often found myself playing guitar or watching TV instead of looking into the problem. I'm not saying there isn't a problem, I really think there is, and I don't understand all of the facets of it. I do know that dealing with insurance companies has become a huge hassle for physicians, and many groups have to hire individuals who do nothing more than deal with insurance companies.
Here's an interesting article about physicians who have started trying a practice with /no/ insurance (none at all, they don't take it). Interesting read.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/lo...tus-quo-doctors-test-no-insurance-3500678.php