Sep 19 2009
The problem with the health care debate
There is a problem with the health care debate that people are not truly discussing: Providing health care to cover all Americans only works if all Americans buy the insurance to cover their health care. Otherwise, there are still going to be people using the emergency rooms and going bankrupt because the costs are too high. Indeed, even under some of the plans being floated around Washington, the costs are too high. Without individuals getting the health care, providing access to it does nothing.
This means there would have to be an individual mandate - individual responsibility - to purchase some sort of health care insurance. Americans are not big on individual responsibility right now, and chances are many people would still rely on emergency rooms because they do not think they need health care right now.
If you are debating the statement that Americans are not big on individual responsibility - think about the current state of affairs. There is a housing market crash because people bought houses they knew they could not afford. Instead they gambled that they would be able to sell the house, or earn more money, at the time the loan reset. That turned out not to be the case, and now hard-working Americans are seeing their tax dollars, and their children’s future, mortgaged to pay for the mess.
A new study done by the University of California, Berkeley, found that college students expect A’s for doing the minimum the teacher asked. The same study found that parents are calling college professors for their students. Helicopter parents are being reported by recruiters who find parents coming to interviews with their children, or calling to make an appointment for their children. The job market is increasingly smaller, and instead of taking what job they can find - say at a restaurant - people are going on unemployment. Disability fraud is a huge cost to all states and the feds - but no one is doing anything about it. When something goes wrong - say you aggravate a large cat at a zoo by throwing things at it and taunting it - the reaction is a lawsuit. Serena Williams yelled profanity at a line judge because she, Serena, did not accept responsibility for her actions. Professional sports players are amazed when they are given consequences for their actions, and take every step they can to fight the consequences instead of saying, “Yes, I did it, I will take my consequences.”
Parents are abdicating responsibility for raising their children to schools. This means that schools cannot teach the children academics because the teachers are too busy trying to get students to respect them - which is a concept parents are supposed to teach. Parents are abdicating all responsibility, thinking that once their children go to school, they do not have to help with anything. Instead of working with a child, parents agree to put their children on medication for ADHD or ADD (there are some students who need this, but it is increasingly becoming a scapegoat to deal with a kid who is, well, a kid).
This lack of personal responsibility is seen all over the U.S. in all areas of life. Not everyone is like this. Some people have personal responsibility and try to pass it on to their children. But when the response to being jailed for a crime is, “What I did shouldn’t be a crime,” that shows a lack of personal responsibility. It was a crime, you did it, you know you did it, and now you have to do society’s version of repentance for the crime.
So how will health care work? There will always be the young adults who say they don’t need it because they are healthy, and the money they would spend on health insurance they would rather spend elsewhere. There will always be the families who need to spend the money elsewhere - like food. There will always be people who don’t want to buy health insurance. The health care debate and overhaul will not work unless these people are also forced to buy some sort of health insurance. Otherwise, the health care debate is simply going to result in nothing.
