A quick rant on health care reform...

I'm irritated with our government and media. I'm almost always irritated with them, but this week I'm more annoyed than usual.

Let's say we all agree that it would be nice if we could supply everyone the health care they need.
Let's further agree that our insurance companies and the laws that currently govern them are often "bad" and they leave some people lacking in care.

Now, the question is what do we do about this situation, if anything?

I think there are a number of things we could do to help the health care cost situation including the importing of drugs and tort reform. We can go more into that later.

I haven't read the bill and I have no intention of trying. Nobody has read the whole bill, with the possible exception of senate pages who may have been forced to read the thing on the floor of the senate while nobody was listening. I've read enough of whats in the bill to be annoyed with our government for having passed it though.

Right now I'd like to rant about how annoyed I am with the media saying the following or it's equivalent over and over: "this bill will make health care more affordable for everyone."

This is such complete bullshit. It's mind-boggling how people in government and the media can even think such things.

I'm particularly annoyed when they use the word "everyone." They are putting a tax on high priced health insurance...which by definition will make health care for those people more expensive. So, right off the bat we can't say everyone.

Next, there are some obvious flaws with the ideas in the bill.
The insurance companies like to avoid covering the sick...particularly those with pre-existing conditions. I'm not saying this is moral or that I like the insurance companies, but it's obvious that this is good for their business. Now, we're going to force insurance companies to cover all the people they wouldn't take previously. Why didn't they take them before? Because they were too damn expensive! So, the assertion is that this bill...which forces the insurance companies to cover all the costly sick people they have been trying to avoid or charge and arm and leg will somehow make premiums for the rest of us go down. This is back asswards. When you add a bunch of expensive people to the insurance rolls, all the healthy people have to subsidize their costs. Adding sick people will mean increased premiums.
Now, the hope is that insurance companies will lower their administrative costs and cut executive pay and such and this will help keep costs in check. There are a bunch of carrots in the bill to get them to try to do this and penalties if it doesn't seem like they are. Pardon me if I'm skeptical that the morons on capital hill could write a bill that would even come close to performing this task correctly and keep a highly profit motive based industry from wanting to earn more profit.

I think I'll also write some about the constitutionality of this absurd mandate to buy health insurance. It would be possible for congress to pass a law that does what this "mandate" does and have it be legal, but the way they wrote it, it is almost certainly unconstitutional.

Go government! Go Media!