I had an interesting conversation with my mother this past Sunday. She works for a local hospital and we were discussing healthcare reform. She pointed out that the hospital had already made 23 million dollars in charity claims for this first quarter.
Now a charity claim is not what it sounds like. It is a claim that someone makes to a hospital when they are unable to afford the healthcare service. Hospitals, you see, cannot deny people service when they show up to the emergency room. Now this does not mean that they get standard care.
But it does mean that when some uninsured idiot shows up with a serious injury or illness, the hospital has to take care of that person. My mother mentioned how there was one woman who shows up every couple of weeks with complications due to her Type-II diabetes and never pays for the emergency care she gets.
Now, you may thinking that this is a good thing, that people who have no insurance or money are getting healed by doctors. That’s where you are wrong.
You see, that 23 million is going to come from somewhere. Guess who ends up paying for it? The productive citizens such as myself. One of the reason for the skyrocketing health care costs is because of freeloading parasites who take advantage of the laws in order to get healed.
That diabetic woman I mentioned earlier? Her condition can be fixed by her simply losing the weight and moving her diet to vegetables and meat with occasional dairy. Will she do that? No, because she has no incentive to do so. People don’t change until the situation they are in is intolerable to them.
So because of this woman’s poor eating habits, the law says that she gets a free ride while people like me struggle to pay for my own children’s medical care.
The costs of healthcare would drop tremendously if we simply allow healthcare providers and hospitals to deny service and if we allow insurance companies to deny coverage. Yes people will lose out, but really only people who made stupid decisions in their lives to begin with.
This is a messy situation and what I have proposed to “fix” it is really only a part of it. As with just about everything in life, there are trade-offs and nobody will ever be 100% covered for all of their medical care all the time. That doesn’t even happen in countries with “Universal” health care plans provided by their Socialist governments.
But this is a small part that I think will reward people who do what they are supposed to do and go out and work and buy insurance and pay their bills.
Because shouldn’t our society hold those people in higher esteem than the lazy?