I am aware of a boy born with a genetic disorder that resulted in seizures. Thousands of seizures that destroyed his cognitive abilities and paralyzed and blinded him. His medical bills have exceeded $2.7 million. Taking this case as an example, why should I pay bigger premiums for him?
This is not without solution.These pre existing cases can go into high risk pools and after all resources are exhausted then a government subsidy can occur for that particular person. I have advocated a VA type infrastructure for the very needy and shift our medicaid into that VA type infrastructure. But don’t punish us because of someones condition or poverty level. That is not fair to US!! These republicrats are WAY OFF on this deal and they wont even show it to us. i have to get this in pieces but this communist crap has got to be defeated. The answer is a private free market system and a safety net for the poor and sick or just go to the ER.
All you're doing is shifting the expenditure from your insurance premium,where you can see it, to your tax bill where it's buried with every other category of government spending.
You're still paying for the kid's care.
Most cases of the type you describe are covered by Medicaid already. Many are covered by charity, both big foundations, appeals on TV, religious groups...and more recently go-fund-me type charity.
To go further could be a special expansion of Medicaid. Most states have a special Medicaid budget item for special situations.
High cost items come in 3 big blips.
1. Babies as you mention.
2. Senior Citizen end of life. It costs a lot of money to keep a dying person alive. Should we have death panels that decide when to stop keeping the elderly near death alive “just a little longer”? My mom was in that situation. While on the edge of death the doctors made a mistake and could have kept her alive a week longer than they did. Some of my siblings sued and got money for that mistake. That kind of stuff increases the cost of medical care bigly.
3. People aged between the two extremes with chronic extreme disabilities. Most of these are bad lifestyle choices. This is the part that is increasing rapidly. How much should we subsidize a repeat attempted suicide of a druggie?
“Taking this case as an example, why should I pay bigger premiums for him?”
My answer would be, for the same reason his parents should pay premiums to cover *your* care if you you slip on the ice and experience a head injury that requires a six month hospitalization and further months of rehab.
This infant (and his parents) were not at choice about his condition, any more than the rest us are “at choice” about the possibility of catastrophic medical bills and/or or lifetime medical costs - we can’t know our future actual risk except in an actuarial sense that is meaningless or misleading to most people.
A lot of people are unclear about this, believing for example that a “healthy life-style” will reduce the likelihood that they will experience high lifetime medical costs, and meanwhile complaining about the cost of insuring others who appear to be taking greater risks with their health.
In fact, the opposite is true: the better your general health in youth and middle age, on the average the *greater* your lifetime medical costs as you are more likely to to live long enough to develop dementia and/or expensive multiple chronic conditions!
On this basis Obamacare (or any insurance scheme which spreads risk across the entire population) is the best deal, long term, for people in good general health as they are the most likely to otherwise face the likelihood of medical bankruptcy in old age (and such costs at the end of life are the real “Death Tax” on average Americans, BTW).
These kinds of concern are IMO the most frustrating problem when it comes to thinking realistically about politics and health insurance: lots of things which are “obviously” true are not, and many things which are true are deeply counter-intuitive.