One thing I don't understand was, when this all began, before ObamaCare, there were 30 million people in USA without health care. In a country of 300Million, that meant 90% had health care. Why mess the 90% up?
Why not target the 30 million and leave the 90% alone? That is called efficiency since the 90% is not costing the tax payer anything. Of that 30 million, half are young people who do not buy health insurance since they are in their prime, not sickly and prefer to spend that money on partying. That leaves 15 million to care for. So why screw up the whole system, instead of targeting just where there was need?
Well for starters you need to get your numbers straight. In 2009 there were 48.6 million people without healthcare insurance in the US which accounted for almost 16% of the population. So that means that 84% of the population had health insurance. But that doesn’t mean they all had adequate healthcare insurance. A good portion of that 84% had mini health insurance policies which only cover a few thousand dollars of coverage at most. Actually, only about 55% of Americans had employer based healthcare insurance and that number has been decreasing. And the remaining 30% of the population had government provided healthcare insurance.
The total number of people with health insurance has been declining as healthcare costs have continued to rise at multiples of the income growth. You don’t have be a math genius to figure out that is not a sustainable situation. The United States has dealt with the healthcare cost problem by shifting costs rather than dealing with the causes, the real drivers of runaway healthcare costs. Healthcare cost for the elderly, the young, and the poor have been shifted to government. Healthcare costs for the employed have been and continue to be shifted from the employer to the employee.
“The number of persons without health insurance coverage in the United States is one of the primary concerns raised by advocates of health care reform. A person without health insurance is commonly termed uninsured (regardless of insurance of objects unrelated to health), and this article uses the term in this sense as well. According to the United States Census Bureau, in 2009 there were 48.6 million people in the US (15.7% of the population) who were without health insurance.[2] The percentage of the non-elderly population who are uninsured has been generally increasing since the year 2000.[3]
The causes of this rate of uninsurance remain a matter of political debate. Rising insurance costs have contributed to a trend in which fewer employers are offering health insurance, and many employers are managing costs by requiring higher employee contributions. Many of the uninsured are the working poor or are unemployed. Others are healthy and choose to go without it. Some have been rejected by insurance companies and are considered "uninsurable". Some are without health insurance only temporarily. Some choose faith-based alternatives to health insurance.” – Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_coverage_in_the_United_States
This may come as a surprise to you but young healthy people get sick too. Young healthy people also get hurt. Contrary to right wing popular opinion, young people are not immortals. I used to work as an EMT for a county EMS agency. The vast majority of my patients were young formerly healthy individuals. I have always had health insurance, even in my youth. Being fiscally responsible, I couldn’t imagine not having it, even when I was in my twenties. My son who is in his 20’s takes his healthcare insurance seriously too. It factors into his career decisions as it did mine. One more thing, partying and being fiscally responsible are not mutually exclusive.
What strikes me as strange is the fact that Republicans/conservatives seem to think that people have a constitutionally protected right to be irresponsible as demonstrated by your statement that money is better spent on partying that providing for an individual’s health and safety. It is the part of the hypocrisy that is the Republican/conservative movement. You guys by your actions (e.g. debt ceiling & government shut down debacles, deregulation, opposition to cost saving healthcare reforms and unfunded Bush II spending and tax reductions) are fiscally irresponsible, and then proclaim yourselves to be fiscally responsible). It's sad, but it is also funny in a sad sort of way.
What you and your fellow Republicans/conservatives or whatever else you are calling yourselves these days, don’t understand and don’t want to understand is our current healthcare system is really screwed up. Our healthcare costs are more than twice as expensive as that of other wealthy nations. And we only provide coverage to an ever decreasing portion of our population. And our outcomes, the quality of our healthcare is declining when compared to the care received by residents in other wealthy industrial countries. Those are the real and hard facts people like you continue to ignore and prefer to remain ignorant of.
I would have expanded the VA to include the 15 million civilians casualties. Was it incompetence or something else that desired to make it all more wasteful?
Aside from incorrect numbers, that paragraph doesn’t make any sense at all.
