Saturday, March 27, 2010

WTF?!?

I just happened to catch a snippet of American news, and one of these "tea party" guys said, and I quote, "some people don't want health insurance". Excuse me?!? Where are these mythical "I'd rather be sick or dead" people? Perhaps I'll believe it if I hear someone say, unprompted, "I don't want health insurance. I'd rather pay for expenses as they come up, and if it was more than I could afford, I'd rather die."

Sheesh.

5 comments:

Daily Male said...

I'm guessing people with this sentiment are those that think "it'll never happen to me". And then when it does, they will have a change of heart.

noricum said...

Yeah. That's what I figure too. Or that they don't want their insurance money going towards other people...

Deneen said...

This Health Care Reform bill has caused such an uproar, it's not even about Health Care anymore. It's become racist and nasty. Something had to be done. Is it perfect, nope, but changes can be made and it's a start. I went 13 years without insurance and misdiagnosed and now pay $1,000 per month for my health insurance and have a $1,000 deduct and then 60/40 up to a certain amount. My doctor co-pays are $40 (but now I've met my out of pocket deductible), my scripts are tiered (one of them bills the insurance company $479!) and that one costs me $90 per month. The surgery I recently had a few weeks ago will cost me an addition $5,600 out of pocket. We need reform.

My husband and daughter rarely use the insurance and no, we have no dental plan, no eyeglass plan...the people I hear saying those words are generally kids, covered under their parents insurance. I'm disgusted with what I read now and spitting on people, etc., all uncalled for.

Okay, I'll step off my soapbox and yours too now :)

noricum said...

Ugh! *shudder*

Yeah, my thoughts about "it's not perfect, but it can be fixed as things settle down" is my opinion too. Sorry about all the nastiness down there. (Once again, I'm glad I live in Canada.)

Bethany said...

Yeah, I have two thoughts on this topic. (Well, OK, I have a LOT of thoughts on this topic. But here are two.)

The first is the same as Daily Male's. They think that it will never happen to them.

I think part of this may tie into the US' Puritan background... leading to a with an assumption (in some cases conscious, in other cases unconscious) that if you work hard and/or are a good Christian, God or the universe or whatnot won't LET bad things happen to you. Which means that most of the time when bad things happen (always to other people, of course) it's because they were bad people. (IIRC the Puritans believed that God only lets good things happen to good people, but Satan may cause bad things to happen to good people. But fewer people believe in Satan these days.)

Two is that most of these "I don't want health insurance" people actually have insurance through their work, so this is all hypothetical. If they lost their job (which of course is impossible because bad things don't happen to them) then I'm guessing their tune would usually change REAL fast. But it's easy to say you wouldn't want to buy health insurance when it's all hypothetical.