About the best I ever hear anyone say about his medical insurance is that it doesn't suck.
You may love your car, your house, your computer, or your music collection, but you never hear anyone rave about his medical coverage.
I do have medical insurance on my job, and it's the main thing that keeps me there. As I get older, such benefits become more important than they did when I was 35 years old and bulletproof. This, by the way, is a factor to consider when you hear numbers about how many uninsured there are. When you're in your 20s and 30s, you're 10 feet tall and invisible, and you may feel you don't need no steenkin' insurance.
At 51 I'm still blessed with excellent health, and about the only time I need medical care is for a patch-up job. My insurance premiums are scandalously cheap and, while the package is being diluted somewhat with a higher deductible come Sept. 1, it's still not a bad plan. It doesn't ... well, you know.
What I'm curious to see is what will happen to this insurance plan if this much-ballyhooed national health coverage goes into effect. And national coverage is no pipe dream either, not anymore. When the Republicans start tossing around their own ideas on that side of the aisle, you know they've capitulated. It's coming, though it'll probably be something between the extremes you've heard so far.
No, I haven't read the text of the proposed medical reform act. Are you kidding? It's not something you actually read; you weigh it instead. Some of it is pretty scary, but that's for another column at another time. And there's the question of why the monopolistic American Medical Association -- my candidate for most of the blame in today's broken health care system -- is so in favor of Obamacare, well, that's also fodder for another cyberscace screed.
But this attempt at a national health care system (call it Obamacare) is one of those things that will, in reality, take a broken system and hide many of its parts.
Even the thought of a govermnent taking over something as delicate and as life-and-death as health care should be scary enough. Shoot, they had trouble administering the Cash For Clunkers program, and buying up a bunch of junked cars is comparatively simple stuff.
Health care run by insurance companies is bad enough. Health care run by a government -- any government -- is a disaster. While outsiders laud the "progressive" systems run in Canada, Great Britian, and most of Europe, folks who live under those systems say it's not such a hot idea after all. There's no guarantee you'll get care, and often the trick in getting a crucial procedure done is in staying alive long enough to watch the whole thing go through one bureaucratic morass after another.
In the United States, we'd essentially be reinventing Medicare and Medicaid. As if those programs are not screwed up enough already.
Enough of that. As I mentioned, it remains to be seen what Obamacare will do to your conventional health-care plans, like the one I have through work.
This thought came up again a couple of days ago when I heard a radio spot for WalMart. Yeah, the company does offer health insurance, and according to employees I've talked to, it does, well, you know. Call it "better than nothing" health insurance. But in this radio spot the WalMart corporation is solidly in favor of a government-based health care plan.
OK. Here's the thinking that came from that announcement: WalMart has historically done all kinds of things to keep wages down. The company -- the world's largest, by the way -- has long been notorious for squashing any idea of unionizing its workers. If its reputation is to be believed, an employee is immediately fired if he even thinks about organizing. So -- duh! Why wouldn't the company just love to get rid of this expense of having health insurance? Hey, if the government picks up health insurance, the company won't have to.
Take that stance and multiply it by all the companies that currently offer some form of group insurance. If that's good enough for WalMart, it's good enough for every other company out there -- including, perhaps, that little company I work for.
I've been getting notes from my company, announcing the higher deductible. Which doesn't bother me all that much, in fact for me it's an incentive to take better care of myself and stay healthy. But the announcement came with a mail-in card giving me the ability to opt out of my coverage before the changes kick in.
This makes me wonder about the future of -- not just my own, but most private health insurance plans. Will I find, a year down the road, that it's no longer there? Or that it does indeed ... again, never mind.
You may love your car, your house, your computer, or your music collection, but you never hear anyone rave about his medical coverage.
I do have medical insurance on my job, and it's the main thing that keeps me there. As I get older, such benefits become more important than they did when I was 35 years old and bulletproof. This, by the way, is a factor to consider when you hear numbers about how many uninsured there are. When you're in your 20s and 30s, you're 10 feet tall and invisible, and you may feel you don't need no steenkin' insurance.
At 51 I'm still blessed with excellent health, and about the only time I need medical care is for a patch-up job. My insurance premiums are scandalously cheap and, while the package is being diluted somewhat with a higher deductible come Sept. 1, it's still not a bad plan. It doesn't ... well, you know.
What I'm curious to see is what will happen to this insurance plan if this much-ballyhooed national health coverage goes into effect. And national coverage is no pipe dream either, not anymore. When the Republicans start tossing around their own ideas on that side of the aisle, you know they've capitulated. It's coming, though it'll probably be something between the extremes you've heard so far.
No, I haven't read the text of the proposed medical reform act. Are you kidding? It's not something you actually read; you weigh it instead. Some of it is pretty scary, but that's for another column at another time. And there's the question of why the monopolistic American Medical Association -- my candidate for most of the blame in today's broken health care system -- is so in favor of Obamacare, well, that's also fodder for another cyberscace screed.
But this attempt at a national health care system (call it Obamacare) is one of those things that will, in reality, take a broken system and hide many of its parts.
Even the thought of a govermnent taking over something as delicate and as life-and-death as health care should be scary enough. Shoot, they had trouble administering the Cash For Clunkers program, and buying up a bunch of junked cars is comparatively simple stuff.
Health care run by insurance companies is bad enough. Health care run by a government -- any government -- is a disaster. While outsiders laud the "progressive" systems run in Canada, Great Britian, and most of Europe, folks who live under those systems say it's not such a hot idea after all. There's no guarantee you'll get care, and often the trick in getting a crucial procedure done is in staying alive long enough to watch the whole thing go through one bureaucratic morass after another.
In the United States, we'd essentially be reinventing Medicare and Medicaid. As if those programs are not screwed up enough already.
Enough of that. As I mentioned, it remains to be seen what Obamacare will do to your conventional health-care plans, like the one I have through work.
This thought came up again a couple of days ago when I heard a radio spot for WalMart. Yeah, the company does offer health insurance, and according to employees I've talked to, it does, well, you know. Call it "better than nothing" health insurance. But in this radio spot the WalMart corporation is solidly in favor of a government-based health care plan.
OK. Here's the thinking that came from that announcement: WalMart has historically done all kinds of things to keep wages down. The company -- the world's largest, by the way -- has long been notorious for squashing any idea of unionizing its workers. If its reputation is to be believed, an employee is immediately fired if he even thinks about organizing. So -- duh! Why wouldn't the company just love to get rid of this expense of having health insurance? Hey, if the government picks up health insurance, the company won't have to.
Take that stance and multiply it by all the companies that currently offer some form of group insurance. If that's good enough for WalMart, it's good enough for every other company out there -- including, perhaps, that little company I work for.
I've been getting notes from my company, announcing the higher deductible. Which doesn't bother me all that much, in fact for me it's an incentive to take better care of myself and stay healthy. But the announcement came with a mail-in card giving me the ability to opt out of my coverage before the changes kick in.
This makes me wonder about the future of -- not just my own, but most private health insurance plans. Will I find, a year down the road, that it's no longer there? Or that it does indeed ... again, never mind.
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