There are really two issues here.
- Issue #1 here is that health insurance today in the U.S. isn't insurance so much as it is a third-party payer for all or almost all of your medical costs. Actual insurance is something that is designed to protect against catastrophic losses, such as what house insurance does. It has a relatively high deductible so that you pay for maintenance and minor issues, which keeps the cost of the insurance down a lot. Health insurance generally covers most all medical costs to some degree, not just the catastrophic stuff. If house insurance were like medical insurance, it would buy a new rug for the kitchen when your kid spills a glass of grape juice on the rug and stains it. The covering of almost all costs is partially why medical insurance is so expensive. The other reason is that it is just about certain that you will run up decently-sized medical bills at some time or other in your life, which is unlike other types of insurance. Most houses do not burn down or get destroyed by tornadoes, but the vast majority of people die of some chronic medical condition. Other types of insurance are basically a bet between you and the insurance company as to whether something major will happen to whatever is insured. If your house had a 90+% chance of burning down and the insurance company having to pay for it, your house insurance would be far, far more expensive than it already is. It would be much closer to health insurance in price.
- Issue #2 is that providing the actual health care isn't free, although the government requires some groups (such as emergency department staff) to provide care for free. You mentioned this in your comment, and it really is a huge deal. The hospital has to make up the cost of providing this care, so they make everything else more expensive. Thus all of us have to pay for this care in the form of increased insurance premiums and medical bills.
Personally, I think the system would be overall less efficient if the government ended up being the mechanism to provide the insurance. Not to mention federal abortion funding and the potential abuse of "end-of-life counseling".
Health care is just like every other tangible good or service- it is not an unlimited one. This whole debate over "solving" health care is a ridiculous one as health care is just another example of the Law of Scarce Resources that we all learned in Econ 101. Nobody is ever going to "solve" health care as it is impossible to make everybody happy.
- If you decide to tax the snot out of anybody that makes any money to pay for complete universal health care, you'll see tax revenues drop sharply as people who make money either leave the country or work less, resulting in nobody really getting any health care paid for at all. Some may disagree as they feel that the people who make money are so greedy that they'd work more to end up with the same amount of net income as before the tax hikes. This is incorrect as many economic studies have shown that the substitution effect (people will work less when they get to keep less of what they make) outweighs the income effect (people will work more to overcome the increased tax burden.) This makes a lot of sense as people are far more lazy than they are greedy.
- If you decide to have a universal health care scheme that doesn't break the bank, there will have to be rationing of care, such as what is happening with the U.K.'s NHS. A lot of people don't like the fact that the government is making a decision to limit their quantity or quality of life, which is why the whole "end-of-life counseling" bit got so much attention. The actual language in H.R. 3962 doesn't have anything to do with "death panels" (it merely says that physicians can get reimbursed for talking to patients about hospice care and such), but people do realize that the "death panels" stuff is very possible and don't like it.
- If you decide to simply have everybody pay out of pocket or by money they saved up, then people without much money can't get much for health care. You get into the whole class warfare and "haves versus have-nots" argument that brought about a lot of the "health care crisis" stuff in the first place.
The end result is that there is no perfect option, else we would have figured it out a long time ago and implemented it. We are not oh-so-much smarter than our predecessors, unlike what some people would have you believe.
Personally, I believe that the third option is the best. It doesn't leave the country insolvent or have some government bureaucrat telling me what I can and cannot have for treatment. It also is the only option that realistically will leave the individual with the responsibility for modifying their own behavior to be healthier. A government program will either completely ignore this (having the guy who lives on Big Macs, Budweiser, and Marlboros pay the same amount in taxes/premiums as the triathlete who wouldn't come within a mile of a cigarette, liquor store, or a McDonald's) or penalize everybody (via taxing "unhealthy" foods.) Yes, some people do get the short straw and are born with few marketable skills and inherited medical problems. But that's where private charity can step in. That already works quite well as there are numerous charity clinics out there that take care of those kinds of people. I know this pretty well as I have worked at one! Even then, the number of people who came in who legitimately were unlucky were very few compared to those who were just irresponsible and/or extremely lazy. The latter group largely could have paid for themselves if they had to get up off the couch and got a job instead of sitting on welfare.
First of all, you should read the U.S. Constitution if you believe that health care is the absolute first thing that tax dollars should go to as the Constitution is pretty specific in what are the responsibilities of the federal government. National defense
is actually one of the few important responsibilities. The debate over whether or not what the U.S. is doing over in the Middle East is another debate altogether and is not germane to this argument.
Secondly, read the part I posted above about scarce resources and the substitution effect vs. the income effect. If you excessively tax the people that make money, they will work less hard to make money and the government will end up with less tax (see the Laffer Curve for a graphical depiction of this.) You'll end up in the same position as before with people not being able to afford health care, except now the businesses and capital that provide jobs are in some other country. I know that in an ideal world it would be great to provide as much health care as anybody needed, but this is not an ideal world and we simply cannot afford it.
now my knowledge is limited on the matter, but this is the very reason why i do not belive america to be the great nation they claim to be.
I would agree that your knowledge is limited on the matter as you have made a largely uninformed and emotional argument. I also agree that America is not as great of a nation as we once were. But, it's
because of the unrealistic idealist thinking and lack of responsibility that the "lets penalize those who work hard and reward those who don't" mentality that you espouse.
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