Obama's Health Care Overhaul: Your Opinions

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by casey35

I may not have the right for this opinion but this is mine. I personally dont think that we the tax payers should have to pay for others insurance. If you dont have insurance which i dont then it should be your responsablity to get some.

I'm curious can you explain what the difference between these are:

Scenario 1: There's a program that people can buy into. This pools the risk. Those who are healthy are, essentially, paying for those who are less healthy. By the time that you, yourself, become less healthy there are other people who have flowed into the system to pay for those who are less healthy which now includes you.

Scenario 2: There's program everyone contributes to. The population that is more healthy pays more into the system then they use in services. The population that is less healthy gets more in services then they are *currently* paying in.

Now, have I described an insurance policy, Medicare or single-payer national healthcare?

The thing is, that description could more or less apply to *any* of them!

So my question is this:

Why is it that if in one scenario, a large, corporation is making profits beyond the dreams of avarice it is a Good Thing (r) and the way the world should work but if in another scenario it is the government that is paying the health care providers that is 'tax payers paying for other's health care'. Both are pools of risk, the two seem pretty much the same as far as I can tell. The *difference* is this: Aetna has one goal and that is to make a profit. If, in the course of doing so, someone happens to get needed medical attention no one at Aetna will shed a tear. But if there is SOME way to deny your claim, they will.

Now, as far as paying for others. In my department, there are a bunch of middle-aged folks, with middle-aged people's problems, and a number of twenty-somethings. The fact of the matter is, the twenty-somethings are *paying* for us middle-aged people. The kids, as we call them, hardly use their healthcare at all while us old farts use it rather often. Should the kids be able to pull out of the insurance because it'll be a decade before they start using the health insurance in a manner closer to what us older folks do?