Mitt "No insurance for uninsured with pre-existing conditions"

[downtown]

Before anybody jumps down my throat here, let me give the full context of the quote:

Jay Leno pushed Mitt Romney last night "to explain what he would offer Americans with pre-existing medical conditions so that they might retain their coverage, perhaps the most popular provision of the president's health care law," NBC News reports.

Romeny: "People with pre-existing conditions, as long as they have been insured before, they are going to be able to continue to have insurance."

Leno: "Suppose they haven't been insured."

Romney: "If they are 45 years old and they show up and say I want insurance because I have heart disease, it's like, 'Hey guys. We can't play the game like that. You've got to get insurance when you are well and then if you get ill, you are going to be covered.'"

Now, the typical retort to that is that folks have trouble buying insurance when they are "young and healthy", especially if they find themselves underemployed....or if they never have the chance to be young and healthy. This was one of the principle reasons for ObamaCare.

Do you think this is an appropriate stance? If you can't be arsed to buy insurance before you get sick, don't cry to anybody if you can't afford it after you get sick? Short of universal health care (which is a political impossibility), are there other acceptable options?

 

[Leoreth]

Make health insurance mandatory and you don't have that problem.

 

[Cutlass]

Leave them in the gutter to die. That's about what it amounts to.

 

[Ajidica]

It really depends on what the pre-existing condition is. If it is a chronic issue a person has, such as needing mental health medicine, then I don't feel that insurers should be allowed to to deny coverage.

 

[downtown]

Make health insurance mandatory and you don't have that problem.

It looks like that is going to be unconstitutional.

 

[Leoreth]

It looks like that is going to be unconstitutional.

The constitution's due for a change, then.

Yes, I know this is a political impossibility.

 

[Tee Kay]

Universal healthcare.

 

[civver_764]

Make health insurance mandatory and you don't have that problem.

Or just provide it for free so people have no reason not to buy it in the first place.

 

[downtown]

Universal healthcare.

Or just provide it for free so people have no reason not to buy it in the first place.

Our country cannot afford it.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

It looks like that is going to be unconstitutional.

What does it exactly take to amend the constitution or to make extensive changes ?
I mean you can't really keep a two hhundred year old document keep you back like that. the founders should have had more foresight to take technological and cultural changes into account.

Our country cannot afford it.

What are you, Botswana ?

 

[Murky]

Before anybody jumps down my throat here, let me give the full context of the quote:



Now, the typical retort to that is that folks have trouble buying insurance when they are "young and healthy", especially if they find themselves underemployed....or if they never have the chance to be young and healthy. This was one of the principle reasons for ObamaCare.

Do you think this is an appropriate stance? If you can't be arsed to buy insurance before you get sick, don't cry to anybody if you can't afford it after you get sick? Short of universal health care (which is a political impossibility), are there other acceptable options?

It depends on who you ask. The narcissists in the GOP/Tea Party will say to hell with the poor or anyone else who can't afford health insurance. If left up to them only the rich and upper middle class will have good medical care. There maybe band-aid fixes that don't amount to much, but the poor would basically be screwed.

Too many concessions were made to get ObamaCare in the first place then they ended up with only 1 Republican vote for the bill.

What we need is Universal Healthcare but it's hopeless unless we throw out all the narcissists from government. That's not likely to happen.

 

[Deviate]

Our country cannot afford it.

We easily could. Raise taxes. Cut military spending. Etc

 

[civver_764]

Our country cannot afford it.

Honestly, when did that start mattering? And if it's really so important it's not that hard to find revenue by taxing the rich, and we could start curing the disease of socio-economic inequality at the same time! It even comes with the side effects of reduced crime and poverty!

I dunno man, sounds like win-win-win-winage to me. And that's without even leaving the capitalistic system. Think of possibilities if we started pursuing sensible policies! Of course that's scary for the people in charge so it's all just dangerous "extremism".

 

[Traitorfish]

Our country cannot afford it.

7 United States
[...]
22 United Kingdom

 

[peter grimes]

Our country cannot afford it.

Of course we can.
We choose not to.
It's all about priorities.

 

[Mise]

If you're going to insist on insurance-based healthcare, then you can't expect insurers to cover pre-existing conditions. That's the whole point of insurance - to insure people against future events. Romney is right: insurance doesn't work if people can rock up to an insurer after their house has blown down, pay $10, then claim for $250,000 of hurricane damage.

Anyway, short of mandating insurance policies at the federal level, I'm sure you could tie things like food stamps to health insurance, so that if you want to get food stamps, you have to have health insurance. And of course compel insurers to offer health insurance at heavily subsidised rates for people on low incomes.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Part of the high GDP per capita comes from having an expensive and inefficient healthcare . If they adopted a system similar to many Euroepan countries quality of life would go up but GDP would go down, and we can't have that now, can we ?

 

[duckstab]

What does it exactly take to amend the constitution or to make extensive changes ?
I mean you can't really keep a two hhundred year old document keep you back like that. the founders should have had more foresight to take technological and cultural changes into account.

The US Constitution has been amended numerous times, but the process is lengthy and difficult by design. The usual method is that the amendment must pass both houses of Congress by a 2/3 majority, then be ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures. In other words, there has to be a lot of sustained political support over much of the country.

The other means of revision is by calling a Constitutional Convention, but that's never happened, in part because such a body would be able to rewrite the whole thing in theory.

Many observers are predicting that the individual mandate will be struck down based on the grilling the US government's attorney was given yesterday by the Supreme Court. That means the health care law as a whole probably won't survive.

We're not going to deny people lifesaving care for lack of insurance. That would be barbaric. This just means the costs are shifted to others, one of the major dynamics that's driving up healthcare costs in the US. I personally know someone without insurance (and ironically, opposed to the law) who ran up a $90,000 bill a couple years ago. He's likely never going to be in a position to pay back that debt, even if his creditors took everything he owned. But the doctors and hospitals want their money, so they just jack up their prices to everyone else. Mr. Etch-a-Sketch knows all this, which is why the law he supported and signed when he was governor of Massachusetts includes an individual mandate.

I think the only long term hope for this is figure out some way to pay for healthcare with tax dollars, because Congress' taxing authority is not at issue. But there's no political will for that either, which means we're likely going to be back to the same crappy, expensive, and economically unsustainable system that Obamacare was supposed to fix.

 

[BvBPL]

Whatever. The Supreme Court will uphold the healthcare bill anyway.

 

[downtown]

We easily could. Raise taxes. Cut military spending. Etc

Of course we can.
We choose not to.
It's all about priorities.

I think we have to look at this in our current context. Our country is stuck in that we have played kick-the-can on some vital domestic projects, AND have a massive debt that is becoming unsustainable. We're also only crawling out of a decade-long slump, and massive tax hikes would jeopardize that.

Yes, we can (and should) increase taxes. Yes, we can remove some middle class welfare subsidies. Yes, we can cut back on military adventures. No, all of that combined isn't enough to be fiscally responsible AND spend the billions (or trillions) needed to make healthcare free.

I hope at some point we do have a universal healthcare system. I do think it would make the most sense in the long run. I don't see how we could legitimately create one without being reckless *at the current economic time*, especially when we still to spend millions on decaying infrastructure and reforming education.

In the near future, if we seriously look at the reality of the US political system, we're stuck with the insurance model. The largest Democratic majority in a generation wasn't seriously close to changing that...we certainly can't do it now.