winterkoninkje | Healthcare fubar

Couldn't've said it better myself (via whswhs):

A New York Times story yesterday, "House Reaches Agreement on Cutting Cost of Health Bill," says the following, among other things:

People with low or moderate incomes could still get federal subsidies to help them buy insurance, but they might have to spend slightly more of their own income — a maximum of 12 percent, rather than 11 percent.

Twelve percent?

A few years ago, when I last had health insurance, I was paying just about 12% of my gross income for it. It was a real hardship for me to do that. I worried about paying the rent; I could afford few luxuries; in fact, having only catastrophic coverage, I couldn't get anything to help with regular medical and dental visits, and shortly after dropping my insurance I realized that I hadn't visited my doctor or dentist in two years, because I was chronically too broke to pay for office visits. And I wasn't all that hard up; I make several times minimum wage, I don't have dependents, and I don't have a lot of common expenses, starting with not owning a car. How on earth is a genuinely poor family with children supposed to afford this?

Let's do the math. Minimum wage is now $7.25. A couple earning minimum wage, both working full time, will have gross income of $29,000. Twelve percent of that is $3480, or $290 a month. That's a big dent in household income. If, like me, you make more than minimum wage, imagine having an extra $290 a month deducted from your pay, and think about what you'd have to give up to compensate.

The original supposition of the left was that everyone would get free, tax-supported medical care. But that has no chance of passing through Congress. Instead, what we look likely to get is a provision under which everyone is forced to buy health insurance, to the benefit of insurance companies with lobbyists in Washington. There's an undercurrent of suggestion that people who don't get health insurance are "not paying their share," that they're self-indulgent or foolish and therefore, perhaps, deserve to be forced to act responsibly, or punished for not doing so with substantial fines. But I tried to have insurance. I'm in my sixtieth year, and being uninsured is no joke for me. And I simply found it ruinously expensive, even in a budget without a lot of the usual expenses.

You know, I really wish Congress would be willing to believe that adults decide not to spend money on something, it's because they really have decided that they can't afford it, no matter how necessary it is. Because if they pass this, they're going to hurt a lot of people.

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