jamazing wrote:
I will also clarify that the market of health insurance and the market of healthcare are two separate markets that are closely tied, but are in fact two different things. Most will enter the healthcare market but it doesn't make a person inheritely part of the other market. Simply because some or even most need to be in both markets to survive doesn't mean that it is absolute to all people, and making that conclusion that they are one is faulty logic. This is the precedent the SCOTUS is faced with by this law.
I'll get to why I quoted this in a minute. If y'all can take yourselves back in time about 3 yrs. to when this first became a hot topic, much of what you've said, Jam, was part of the Republican response to the HCRA. You may also remember the statements of rebuttal. No one is being forced into carrying health insurance. Most of the people who chose not to do so are young. Now, they can be covered by their parents' insurance until they're 26yrs. old. This assumes that, by age 26, they will have gone to and graduated from college and are now employed. It also gets them past the age when young men, especially, are prone to injury from car accidents--but that's an aside.
If a person feels s/he doesn't need health insurance, that's fine. If s/he can pay for needed health care at the time, that's fine. It's when accident victims are transported to the ER or when otherwise healthy persons are diagnosed with whooping cough (get your vaccination!), cancer, tetanus, cat scratch fever--any number of little thought of diseases--and require extensive hospitalization, rehab, etc., for which most people cannot pay 'out of pocket,' that the fine kicks in.
This is what the SCOTUS will publish its decision about--is the individual mandate constitutional. At risk is the provision that pre-existing conditions may not be used by insurance corps to deny coverage, something they've fought against from the beginning because of the expense to them and their share holders. In doing so, however, the corps could open the way for the so-called 'public option'--a kind of Medicaid plan to which everyone would contribute based on their ability to pay. The insurance lobby shot that idea down early on because it was afraid it would lose too many customers. If the parents of an autistic child can get insurance coverage for that child under a kind of medicaid plan, but not get it through the plan offered by their employers, which plan will they likely chose? How about a child with MD or MS?
This is why i quoted the above. Jam, you say you don't need to be in either the health care market or the health insurance market. You're apparently older than 26 if you own your own business. You also offer your employees affordable insurance for health care. Did the government tell you you had to do this, or was it a part of your Welfare Capitalism that you did on your own in order to attract the labor (either physical or mental) you need to run your company?
No matter what, the decision--which may come next week--will change people's lives.
"Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."
— Lewis Carroll
