2013
Mr. Obama come here and ask these people if they can afford their health care or premiums, ask them if they have $30 a month to spend on contraceptives or a few hundred to spend on routine care or if they need tax credits to pay for “affordable” premiums.
We accept blindly the idea of health care being unaffordable regardless of its cost, but we never question other ways people voluntarily spend money that are equally unaffordable to them.
And then there are those among us who help the need for health care along while also spending money in pleasurable ways.
The liberal ideology says we know best, we know what is unaffordable, we know you can’t afford to spend your hard-earned money on even manageable health care costs so we are going to make those services free. We are going to mandate what must be paid for by someone else. We don’t want you spending money on health care because then you would not have money to buy a turkey leg for $12.00, a $7.00 hot dog or five cents of popcorn for $6.00. If you had to pay for the full cost of an office visit, you wouldn’t be able to spend $400 to take your family to the park for a day.
This might be funny if it weren’t true. Nobody wants to spend money on health care, including me. Even a modest co-pay is a burden when you think of what else $30 could buy that provides more perceived (but not real) value. We have been conditioned for more than seventy years to separate spending on health care from every other thing we spend money on; to think about it differently. Obamacare plays on that conditioning in the worst ways by reinforcing the idea of “free.” We are headed in exactly the wrong direction.
Health insurance is necessary, health insurance that protects from catastrophic, unmanageable expenses, but that does not include expenses that are in the same range as other things we buy routinely without questioning their cost. Until we view spending on manageable health care exactly the same as manageable beauty care, restaurant meals, vacations and such, we will always have a health care cost problem. Think how things might be different and less expensive if every health care service outside a hospital was not covered by insurance? Crazy you say?
That’s the way it was in many plans back in the 1960s when an office visit cost $5.00; what should be $39.55 in 2013 dollars. Instead, that’s little more than what many people have as a co-pay.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
We live in a “here and now” society. “You only live once – spend what you have now and will worry about tomorrow when that day arrives.”
Many people feel the same way about Health Care. Why worry about it – just go to the emergency room and they will take care of you. It may take me two years to pay the bill but why worry about it. “I really can not afford those insurance premiums – I need my new cars, cigarettes, beer and biggy burgers.”
We all know that Free is not Free – there is always a catch to every Free item obtained.
It is the “I do not give a damn” attitude and “What’s in it for me” that is killing this nation. Pass the debt along let the next generation to worry about the debt and these costs. Who will we all be working for next.
And we keep voting in those who want more but want to have someone else pay for it. Term limits and more impeachments are the only way we will begin to have accountability in office.
Who ever heard of having an election by the people and then allowing someone with deep pockets and a desire to grow their own self worth end up choosing our leaders in an archaic system called the Electoral College. We must be crazy to continue with this system.
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Good health is priceless. Without good health, in life in retirement, nothing else much matters. A copayment for a visit? A copayment for a script? Even though I pay all out of pocket other than preventive in my hdhp, it is a privilege to obtain the services needed to maintain or improve my standard of living. Money well spent, more than “double digit” returns! Ad’s would say “priceless”
Dick, I hope someday people will realize that this “expensive” stuff is a rare, valuable gift – and treat it that way. I watched family members recover from illness to provide me and my children the gift of their love and wisdom. Priceless.
We are so lucky.
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