They Did What Now?

Yep.

They made it law.  If you happened to be hiding under a rock yesterday, I'm talking about "health care", the bill that PBO just signed to insure every American.  Or something like that.

From what I can glean, reading an equal amount of glowy, rainbow-y tributes and angry, steamy ranting, what the bill actually comes down to is: buy health insurance or pay extra on your taxes.  There is no low-cost option for insurance, so pretty much people are stuck with the same cost for healthcare they've always had.

Just as an example, let's pretend that if the Husband's employer didn't offer us health insurance as a benefit, that we could get our insurance from Blue Cross Blue Sheild at the same rate that we get it now.  (This is just for an example.  We couldn't get it this cheap--the company gets a deal.)

We pay right around $260 per month for insurance for our family.  If money was tight (as it presumably is for uninsured people), it would make more sense for us financially to pay $400-$700 in our taxes each year than it would to pay over $2400 in insurance.  And that's just if we could get the insurance for our current rate--we almost certainly could not.  It would be much more likely to be $2400 a month, to insure the whole family, with vision and teeth.

You can argue that it will ultimately cost more to be uninsured.  Maybe--but that doesn't change the fact that we don't have an extra $2400 per month laying around.  We simply don't have the ability to buy insurance if our employer doesn't help.

So ultimately what this legislation would mean to us, were we uninsured, is that we would remain uninsured, but we would have to pay (minimum) $400 more on our taxes every year.

I think universal healthcare is predicated on the idea that no one is uninsured willingly, they are uninsured because they lack the money to be insured.

So this legislation makes sense how, again?

Breanna