Something big will come up with us medically eventually, meaning me or my wife. And not having insurance won't mean a dang thing. For now, even with my current medical bills (my leg), and past medical bills we are paying on, they are still far less than what insurance costs. Not having insurance is pretty low on my priority list right now. With the rate hikes, millions of people with insurance close to my situation are going to drop it. I doubt those figures will show up in any reports or studies. It is all a scam. Just another scam amid a slew of others.
That has been at the bottom of this whole thing from the git-go. This was never about health CARE, it was about health INSURANCE.
Pockets are getting lined, special interests are being catered to, and at the expense of the health, income, jobs, and I'd wager lives of those who fall through the cracks.
Naturally that bunch of socialists and government employees in DC who have spent trillions of nonexistent money on anything under the sun don't realize that the rest of us, whether business or private individual have to pretty much pay as we go. The money comes from somewhere. Without it, things don't happen.
Our checkbooks have to balance.
What they have done is cost a lot of Americans perfectly workable ways of paying their medical bills, most commonly through a combination of high deductible or limited coverage (catastrophic care) insurance and paying out of pocket.
It is expensive to pick up the tab all of a sudden for every meth head and crack addict out there to do a year of 'treatment' and rehab, (maybe twice), and to pay for the 1.3 million already diagnosed HIV/AIDS sufferers out there, not to mention the people they infect.
Keep in mind that we would have picked up the tab for a lot of that anyway, through Medicaid or other government programs, now we pick up the tab for that (and more) because the costs for these patients to be insured and pay the insurance company people, and the hospital people to do the paperwork, earnings for the stockholders, and all the other middlemen between the patient and the doctor are folded in.
No wonder insurance costs 4 times what it did, has a higher deductible, and is now affordable for many of us, especially if we were self-employed.
