“but why should others who try to stay as safe and healthy as possible have to pay for it?”
Insurance was designed as an opportunity to transfer risk from one party to another. The party that was willing to take the transferred risk specifically set up business models to ensure that they could maintain financial viability and reap a financial reward for assuming that risk. Their business models assumed that some small number of high risk folks would be offset by a much lager number of small risk folks.
The individuals willing to pay them for assuming the risk of a catastrophic financial event understood this business model. Then we had wage caps and employers had to find another way to attract the most qualified job candidates, so they started offering health insurance as a benefit package and over time many services were rolled into that benefit.
Now we have transitioned from INSURANCE to CARE and that benefit is utilized for all sorts of basic medical industry services. We have completed the transition from a transfer of risk product to a complete medical care benefit package and then we are shocked that the costs have skyrocketed!
Ask yourself about car insurance. We buy auto insurance to protect ourselves from financial ruin in the case that we have a catastrophic unforeseen event. What would happen to the cost of your auto insurance policy if society decided that it should cover regular maintenance as well as catastrophic events? If we transitioned auto insurance to include oil changes, repairs, new tires, etc. then we would have unaffordable auto insurance policies!
Then everyone would scream that we need to dictate the type of gas you use or frequency of your long trips to ensure that your maintenance costs did not effect the collective costs!
The transition from health insurance to “health care” has been a wonderful training tool to get folks to agree with collectivization! Don’t fall for their trickery.
Yes tying health insurance to employment (as you said an artifact of WW2 price controls) resulted in a bad outcome.
It divorced the covered person from the costs.
I understand what you are saying.
But how can you voice a consistent conservative message if, on the one hand, you’re assailing the food stamp nation and the Obamaphone takers, yet on the other hand you’re championing the cause of people who abuse their bodies and expect others to pay for their resulting health problems?
In both cases, there is no free market. Taxes to prop up the 47% are just as mandatory as those we’re going to pay for Obamacare. And those who live on the government largesse are required to jump through hoops to qualify.
I’m struggling to find a consistent, across the board stance on all this stuff. The minute the government gets its hands on a program which impacts you, you no longer have the ability to march to your own drum. They call the tunes.
I guess it’s all in the semantics. Obamacare is not insurance in the traditional sense of risk sharing. It’s just universal health care posing as insurance in order to close the sale.