Thursday, October 11, 2007

Does anyone believe this?

by shamanic

Rick Moran, on SCHIP:
The liberal answer to this unfairness is not try and make private insurance more affordable or come up with some other private alternative but to expand the program even further thus trapping more people into a dependency that prevents them from keeping the benefit if their income exceeds a certain amount. The disincentives in the program are obvious. It may make for good politics but it’s lousy policy.
Does anybody think that a person offered a higher-paying job with health insurance for his or her family will turn it down in order to continue paying for SCHIP at a lower salary rate?

Also, according to the conservative theory of the universe, private insurance is always, indisputably, better - providing access to more doctors and dentists, with better plans allowing more options in pricing, and better coverage of medicine and tests. So why the concern about "trapping" people? When a person has access to affordable private insurance (usually through a new job), the person's going to take it.

Of course the ugly truth is that private plans aren't very good either. There's very limited doctor choice, the customer service sucks, and I'm endlessly receiving these documents that look for all the world like bills, prominently labeled "THIS IS NOT A BILL". I don't know what's up with private insurance, but it's byzantine, doesn't cover what it chooses not to cover but you only know once you're holding a document that isn't labeled "THIS IS NOT A BILL", and no one can provide you with reliable information about what it will cover.

That being the case, perhaps the Rick Morans of the world do have reason to worry about people becoming "trapped" in an affordable version of the same sucky healthcare the rest of us live with.

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