A Foreign Idea... Personal Responsibility

It appears to me that the agenda is to end the need to feel personal responsibility. Why plan for a rainy day? For life to throw us a curve? To gather our meat, nuts and berries for winter? Just look at all the agendas being passed by this Congress and by past Congresses of the Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter and now the Obama eras. All these programs went far beyond giving folks the ability and assistance to plan for retirements, to save for retirements, to build assets to live on or use if and when life dealt an unfair hand or a major illness disrupted life. They took over our lives. They provided for us, not gave us opportunity to provide for ourselves. And now we have the take over of the insurance industry. And yes, to a great extent, the insurance has only themselves to blame. I for one begged, pleaded, held meetings and argued my case to at least one insurance company to little result when it came to achieving affordable premiums. But I had shopped and paid those premiums "just in case" the day came we would need them. And we did. My wife contracted and died from cancer. Over her two year fight, our insurance company paid out about $400,000 in claims to the providers. I paid $13,000 in deductibles. I knew those deductibles could be that high. And I knew that was risk, yes risk, I could afford. With today's signing, no one below a certain income level has to even have insurance until after an incident or catastrophic diagnosis and an insurance company must carry you. But at what cost? No one has said. What if those premiums are $1200 per month? Can anyone afford that? Not many and those who can are either self insuring with high deductibles and no doubt already own insurance! So, will you get fined and taxed for refusing to get insurance that you sought but now also have the extra burden of bearing the costs of your medical care? Soon we will begin to get those answers.

And please answer me this - today at the signing of the Health care bill, he called it Health Insurance Reform. Democrat leaders started using this term within the last month. Until then, they denied this was the intent of the bill but that it was "comprehensive health care reform". ????! I am working to try and gather the text, quotes, video, audio of such claims and will share them when I get them together.

If this had been touted as health insurance reform, then the bill is even more deceiving with all that it affects. Even so, we could have done much more to rein in the insurance industry that has acted about as responsible as the financial industry of the last few years. We could open up opportunity for everyone, at any income level, to setup and contribute to pre-tax dollar Health Savings Accounts whose use was at the discretion of the owner of the account, free to audited by the tax folks to prove or insure use only for medical needs, and these accounts could be passed generation to generation tax free. This would be incentive for families to provide for the children's future healthcare, and if health was good throughout and healthy lifestyles maintained, their children's children could also be taken care of. Eventually this would lead to real competition for your insurance dollar from companies in business to supply you catastrophic insurance. Low risk is cheaper than a policy that pays for you to do anything you wish without cost. I know, too logical.

Perhaps allowing insurance companies, at their expense or to be counted against your deductible, to require you to obtain an annual or bi-annual physical and age appropriate preventive medicine and tests. My colonoscopy was not covered in my deductible from American Republic Insurance, even though having the insurance gave me a bit of a discount from the doctors and hospitals "listed" price on the procedure. But the $1600 out of pocket did not count toward my annual $5000 deductible. Therefore, other than myself and my doctor's dedication to preventive medicine, there is no financial incentive for me to do so.

Where is the cost controls and oversight of the outrageous charges and billing errors of healthcare providers? The stock market isn't seeing any as the health industry stocks are all up since passing of the bill. Hmm, makes one wonder what they've read in this bill and they must believe profits are going to go up. Translated: medical costs are going up!

The belief the nanny state is the agenda of Democrats and the left is evident in the immediate implementation that children can stay on their parents policies till age 26. This is simply just offensive. A proper answer to the concern of students obtaining health insurance should have been insurance companies developing and offering products with 20, 30, 50 year or lifetime contracts. Thus, the younger and presumably healthier you are, the more likely you are to pay for many years with fewer claims, seek preventive medicine to maintain your low rate and thus slow or delay the higher claims to a later age. It should be possible to have level payments over many years with the use of proper actuarial data and adaption of healthy lifestyles.

But, now our healthcare is the same ponzi scheme that Social Security is now. As well as Medicare and Medicaid is now. We are paying for our parents and current retirees on these programs. There is no trust fund to fund us in these programs. Congress should be held accountable to repay all borrowed funds from the Social Security and Medicare funds. Doing so, they would likely find that our Social Security and Medicare taxes could be cut due to all the surplus funds that would have been in these programs.

But of course they are insolvent. That is every elected official's fault at the Federal Government level who has served in the last 50 years or more. You know what to do. Do it. Vote. Just not for whose in office now. Throw out the good ones as well as the bad ones. Give to campaigns in other districts, other states to defeat those most responsible for our current state of affairs.

See, now you have something to work for, look forward to and make getting up in the morning worth it!