I haven’t blogged in a while, mostly because I recently was let go from my nice, work-from-home job and had to find other employment. Fortunately, my job profession is in high enough demand these days that it didn’t take long for me to get a couple of job offers. On top of that, my wife and I have been working to keep my two-month-old son alive so we can keep the tyrants known as Social Workers off our backs (but I have better reasons for keeping him alive; mostly it has to do with healthy organ storage).
Through all this, I had to look into better medical insurance plans because I’ll be damned if I am going to pay 1800 dollars a month under COBRA and because the Federal tyrants will fine me for not having insurance. Which brings me to a bunch of questions about the Affordable Healthcare Act (aka Obamacare) that I haven’t heard any pundits talk about:
- If the act lived up to its namesake, then why is there a fine for people who do not buy health insurance? Seriously, if they wanted to make it affordable, why didn’t they just mandate all insurance plans to not exceed 500 dollars a family and leave it at that? I know that politicians have little to no grasp on economics, so I would never put it past them to do this, but at the same time, isn’t it not odd that this notion never crossed their minds? (I know why, but that’s another topic)
- If there is a fine for people who haven’t bought their own health insurance, then why do we still have Medicare and Medicaid government plans in place? I mean, since it is illegal now to not have health insurance, then shouldn’t we stop wasting billions of dollars on these plans and make poor people and the elderly pay for their own plans? And shouldn’t people who are on Medicaid and Medicare be fined because they don’t have health insurance?
- If the whole mandated coverage of pre-existing conditions was part of the bill, then why did I have to fight with Cigna last fall to make them cover what they considered a pre-existing condition? So either Cigna didn’t get the damn memo from Congress or the politicians outright lied to the American people and pre-existing conditions are no longer covered. Or there is specific language in the bill that targets me or people like me (young, white producers who pay their own way). I didn’t read it, I’m just going on what I was told.
- If the act was supposed to make healthcare more affordable, why did they eliminate the use of Flexible Spending Accounts with over the counter drugs? I mean, it’s bad enough that I have to be treated like a criminal every time I go to get Claritin-D (or it’s cheaper knockoff) every time I go to a pharmacy, but now I can’t get it free of taxes?
- Why was there language in the bill to rework how student loans work? I mean, couldn’t that have been a separate bill entirely? I serious question the attention span of these morons in Congress given all the riders they put in their bills.
The simple fact is, Obamacare only secured the jobs and careers of major medical insurance executives and that’s about it. The one thing you can count on when it comes to any institution, be it government or private or whatever, is that nothing changes unless the pain of keeping things the way they are is much greater than the pain of changing it. From software development to government programs to the Catholic Church, this is probably one of the few fundamental rules of human organization.
In the end, Obamacare proved that the old saying from the late King Solomon is right: there is nothing new under the sun.