How can you be fined by the government for refusing to purchase a service?
The proposed healthcare plan states that for individuals choosing not to become insured, they will be charged $750 per person, or $1500 per family. So, basically, if you choose not to sign up to pay for a voluntary service, and you get fined by your government.
How can this be? There is no constitutional or other authority for government, or anyone else really, to force you to purchase a service, or product of any kind. How can you be fined for simply declining to buy something that is voluntary to begin with? If they want healthcare to be mandatory then they need to make it required by law. This would not be as blatantly unconstitutional, as for example we are required to purchase car insurance in order drive. However, we can still choose not to drive.
It seems very wrong to be penalising people for their choice not to buy insurance. Taxes pay for much of our healthcare as it is. Someone who opts out of buying health insurance for any number of reasons, is still paying a substantial portion of their income to healthcare. And on top of it, if this gets passed, they will get slapped with an extra $750 a year. And since this is much more expensive per year than the cheapest healthcare plans proposed that will be available for purchase, it will just force everyone into the heathcare system, whether they like it or not. It would be stupid to pay $750 a year in fines when you could pay $350 a year to get a basic insurance plan.
I understand that they want to expand coverage to everyone. But fining you for choosing not to buy something seems completely counter to the liberal ideals of freedom and individual rights.
I agree. It’s a cop-out. At best, a weigh-station to the Public Option, itself a way-station to Universal Health Care. Hopefully the dominos eventually fall, but I think a whole lot more could have been done to just push the Public Option onto the table.
They basically try to use the argument that most states require you to have automobile insurance to justify it. I’m not quite sure whether or not I agree with this argument. I disagree because the difference between not having your car insured versus not having health insurance is that you can cause a person real, tangible injury to both property and person and have no means by which to make restitution, that’s not exactly true with health insurance.
This is obviously true for auto insurance, but it is also true for medical insurance to an extent because hospitals cannot refuse an individual treatment for an emergency, so having to shell out the costs to treat those individuals could have an influence on where tax dollars are going and could also be one of the reasons (and there are many) that health insurance is so high in the first place.
On the other hand, an alternative to not having auto insurance is simply not to drive/own an automobile, and obviously, the Government doesn’t fine people for failing to own an automobile. Presumably, an individual that would not obtain health insurance is refraining from doing so because they are one of the lower-middle class people that fall just between not being able to get any Government Assistance while not quite being financially self-sufficient. If that is the case, I fail to see how fining such people will help their situation at all!
A bigger problem is the “invincible youngster”. May people between the ages of around eighteen to the mid-thirties rationally opt not to have health insurance because they are basically healthy and the chance of a catastrophe is relatively small and the most common of those catastrophes are covered by other, redundant forms of insurance anyway (like the aforementioned auto insurance). The problem, then, is that people with health insurance are also the most likely people to need it. Since insurance is a for-profit business, that means that insurance companies have to deny payment for coverage for people who need it in order to remain profitable. This is also part of the reason why the US government spends so much on healthcare, because when those invincible people end up, err, not being so invincible the government has to pick up the tab because they go into bankruptcy and default on their medical bills. This is compounded by poor people who make the rational decision that they are healthy enough and money spent on some potential future service would be better spent on some more immediate concern, like food, clothing, and heat.
If supply-and-demand holds true in the case of insurance, it follows that requiring those healthy people to buy into insurance would both lower costs for everybody and ensure better service because healthy people subsidize unhealthy people. But since robust competition doesn’t exist in the insurance sector nor is there any reason to initiate competition from the insurance companies’ perspectives, it is just a huge gift to the very people who have caused the problem.
That is, unless a spoiler like a public option is included . . .
I’d most like to know what kind of insurance is going to be required not to be fined. I fall into the, “Relatively young and in good health,” category, so even though I fully insure my wife and son, I cover myself only with hospitalization or emergency and 80% of prescriptions or something like that.
My understanding is that it is like car insurance where the minimum really is quite small. While it hasn’t been fully hammered out yet, I imagine the only thing they’ll really care about is hospitalization since that is where the US government is presently losing the most money.