I’m Nancy’s sister-in law. I was there on Easter, eating ice cream cake with Jack and everyone else. Nothing hypothetical here!

Nice try.

You snarked, ” … you’ve never heard me complain about the fact that my insurance premiums help to finance your trips to the emergency department for all of your skateboard and snowboarding injuries.”

PERHAPS the reason you’ve never whined about your hypothetical skateboarder-dude is because the bulk of your premiums are paid by for tax free by your employer!?

It’s easy to wag one’s finger when one actually can have her cake and eat it too.

Your complaints might also have been minimized by the fact that so many of these teen crash dummies are covered by mommy or daddy’s employer based health insurance.

You also conveniently ignored that fact that something like $600 million in federal free care funds pay the bulk of the emergency care consumed by your accident prone nephew.

Listen up folks. Here’s the favor Aunt Nancy wants to do for you. You get to fund lawmakers health insurance premiums with your taxes and they receive that extra federal and state tax free income.

Wow! A double tax subsidy.

Meanwhile they get to mandate that you buy private health insurance with your *after* state and federal tax dollars.

I wonder if there’s an unequal treatment class action lawsuit herein.

And, since employees with employer based plans get similar tax free income the real subsidies go *to* the insured and not the other way around.

If your uninsured and have never been to the emergency room or hospital for free care you’re not costing Nancy a dime.

OTOH if her employer pays the bulk of her premiums she’s costing you a lot of dimes as you make up her share of that tax free extra income.

And, Nancy further muddied the issue when she further snarked, “… car insurance costs more because I help to pay for the accidents of teenaged drivers like you.”

Actually it’s more the other way around. Teen drivers car insurance is kept artificially low by those aforementioned lawmaking parasites who have chosen to keep their rates “affordable”.

With streamlined single payer financing we could (and should, I think) retain our private delivery system. The payment mechanism for universal insurance coverage would be socialized and the delivery of services would remain largely in the private sector. This is how most other countries do it except Great Britian and Spain.

What we need is socialized financing, or socialized health insurance, not socialized medicine.

In addition to the above links, also see http://www.PNHP.org/facts/singlepayer_faq.php

How, you ask? By establishing universal healthcare with social insurance using the streamlined “single payer” financing model.

It’s the hip human rights thing to do.

This approach treats health insurance — the “ticket” to timely healthcare — the way we treat payment and access for fire department, police, and public health services. Imagine if you had to purchase your own commercial insurance product for each of those; ridiculous!!

People will look back and have that thought about how we currently allow healthcare to be treated as a commodity and privilege instead of as a protected right for everyone.

Universal healthcare is the civilized thing to do.

This is why every single other industrialized country in the world has a form of universal coverage that uses a social insurance model. It’s the humane, economically smart thing to do. The proof is in the fact that each of these countries spend far less than we do (one-third to one-half less per capita!!) and get much better health outcomes than in MA or the U.S.

With streamlined single payer financing, everybody pays in a fair share and everybody gets covered. It’s a no brainer, ‘cept the insurance companies don’t like it much…hmmm, whose priorities are the politicians putting first?…

It’s time to speak truth to power and save a lotta needless suffering — and a whole lotta cash — with real universal healthcare reform.

Learn more at http://www.MassCare.org/legislation and http://www.DefendHealth.org

I think Jack touched on a legitimate point that was never addressed here:
What about young single people? Will they be forced to purchase an expensive health care plan that provides coverage meant for a family of four?

I’m young and single. All I ask for is a simple, inexpensive catastrophic plan, an annual checkup, and minimal prescription coverage. But MA keeps passing regulations about insurance policies that make this plan impossible. So young people continue to pay thousands for health care they don’t need at a time when they’re on their own and have small budgets.

I wear a seatbelt even in the back bench of taxicabs. In fact everybody I know wears seat belts. It’s even a badge of honor to buck established trend (by the Establishment, by the Man) to wear a seatbelt. All of my anti-establishment, MySpace meathead friends like to throw that bit of that antithetical cool in the face of anyone over 30.

(Some dude who was recently involved in a 95 MPH wipeout on the Garden State Parkway is reported not to have been wearing his though. What’s his name, governor-sombody-or-other; former co-chair of Goldman Sachs. (You know today’s youth: we don’t know or care about anything but sk8ing.))

Speaking of board sports, we don’t injure ourselves a whole lot. The ‘rents usually pick up the tab on their insurance on those real super rare occasions when we spill on a Heelflip. Otherwise we roll up to the plate and pay the cast bill ourselves; if some dumb self-aggrandizing palace of a hospital isn’t trying to push pain-killaz on us after hitting us up for full-body radiographs.

No Nukes,
Sk8ter Gen Z Slack Dude