Well, then, good. Let's get on with it.
My car insurance doesn't cover oil changes; my homeowner's insurance isn't going to cover replacing a screen door that went kaput during the storms last weekend; so why the hell does health insurance cover routine check-up visits?
I'll even go one step further. If I were to use my prescription coverage for my meds, it'd end up costing me more out of pocket. Here's what I want. I want health insurance that doesn't play stupid games with deductibles and routine services. I need my meds every day, and I know how much those cost. I need bloodwork every now and then as a completely routine matter, and I want to know how much that costs so I can budget for it. However, if I get run over by a bus tomorrow, I want to wake up in a hospital knowing that I'm insured and will only have to worry about a small deductible, same as if a drunk driver plows into my car and I need $10k of body work or if a tree falls on my house and I need to replace the roof.
Why do we have a system where "insurance" covers routine things and it's nearly impossible to get a price for so many things?
I don't want to pay for womyn-born-womyn to use the pill. It's not my problem. You don't want to pay for me to take estrogen. It's not your problem. These aren't life-threatening things.
The only problem is that unlike you and me, the vast majority of people aren't and never will be perfect, virtuous Randians[!]
Now, the following is a misogynist rant, sure, but I hope to illustrate the larger problem. If it's more useful, imagine I were writing about some other failure of human behavior like dudebros cruising around town drunk and having a near-fatal crash wherein somebody innocent, but lacking any kind of insurance, requires intensive medical care for some extended period of time.
If womyn-born-womyn have to pay some amount per month to have access to the pill, then there are a good number of them that won't. However, being falliable human beings, they'll go out and have sex anyway. Then, since if they weren't willing to take a basic precaution that somebody with a womb should take before going on a wild sex adventure (not saying there's anything wrong with wild sex adventures, but we have the technology to go about it safely!), they're sure as hell not going to have the cash sitting around for an abortion. Then, 9 months later we have a real problem: an unwanted or at least unexpected mouth to feed.
So, it makes financial sense to make the pill and abortions available to womyn-born-womyn at no cost, because the alternative is that my tax dollars, instead of going to services I may wish in a perfect world a womyn-born-womyn would consider before having sex (simply because life isn't fair and they'd be perfect Randians in this ideal world and realize that their self-interest is served by taking precautions even if guys don't have to but it's just the way it is no matter what anyone wants), will now go towards feeding a child for 18 years.
People (regardless of gender) are bad at judging risk. People are especially bad at making financial judgements when it comes to health.
I used to be a libertarian (and intend to keep voting Libertarian because I think we need to seriously reconsider the scope of the federal government and I have this abstract hope that one year, enough people will vote Libertarian and Green not just to send a message to the two big parties but that the form of that message will be a number of gold and green seats in Congress), but the older I get the more I realize that the free market does not work for health care.
Our current system is utterly broken. Romney/Obamacare is even more broken, and as others have said, the more information that comes out about the failure of the healthcare.gov rollout, the more it becomes apparent that Obamacare at least is more about shuffling money around Washington than it is about attempting to do anything about the things that are broken with our employer-subsidized healthcare scheme of a system.
At this point, with apologies to Churchill, all I can believe is that while single payer is a terrible system, all the other systems we've come up with are worse. Maybe insurance works well for cars and houses, but there are clearly things at work that make that model unsuitable for delivering medical care, whatever those things may be.
The only thing, though, is if Obamacare were meant to pave the way for single payer, how could that possibly play out?
The two more likely scenarios I think will happen is that either Obamacare will get repealed entirely in 2015 after the Republicans win enough of a landslide to have veto-proof control of both houses of congress or perhaps we'll see most of it get repealed with the exception of certain restrictions on insurers such as being unable to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions.
Now, who knows. Is it unimaginable that we might see some sanity and perhaps attempt to decouple health insurance from employment? I don't know.
The one thing I do know is that single payer would cut out an epic shit ton of overhead in healthcare delivery and put an end to a health insurance industry that seems to have become nothing more than a parasite on the entire process.
Let's just do it right, though. No more of this unconsitutional scope creep of federal government. Prohibiting alcohol took a constitutional amendment. However, somewhere we decided that prohibiting cannabis did not, creating welfare programs did not, and that Obamacare did not. Amend the constitution and give congress the power to fund health care, not insurance, for every citizen of the USA.
There is just too much bullshit about these days, and it's not solving the problem we have with healthcare delivery. Sadly, there are too many people in the USA who believe that they're just morally superior to everyone else, that they won't get sick some day (not like others, at least, because they live healthy, virtuous lives unlike the others), that there is some mysterious force that keeps alcoholics who need new livers out of their insurance pool, and that they're all "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" whose virtue alone will surely propel them towards health, wealth, and wisdom while the morally inferior suffer in the squalor they deserve.
The idea that government can't do anything right has become one hell of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only way we'll ever make progress is if the voters hold the two major parties accountable. Did Obama fuck up royally? Sure. The answer is not to vote Republican. Did Bush the Younger fuck up royally? Sure. The answer is not to vote Democrat.
There are two parties out there---the Libertarians and the Greens---that I feel more accurately reflect the kinds of dialogues and debates we need to be having. The old puritan ways are gone; the atomic family has been shown to be the impossible myth it always was; the war on drugs is an absolute failure in all measurable ways with the exception of the wonderful job it's done creating a quasi-police state; the war on terror is an utter sham; the two major political parties seem to be more concerned with using the Constitution to snort coke off hookers instead of using it as the extensible framework it was meant to be; and we're beginning to question the wisdom of unbridled capitalism and to wonder just what we do as the king of the hill match of income disparity leads us back to wage-slavery.
I don't know enough about the Greens, but I do know that not everybody agrees with the Libertarians. I may be looking into the Green party more seriously next year. It's clear that anyone voting for R or D next year and in 2016 is just throwing their vote away.
Well, this post went on longer than I thought it would. If you're a young person reading this who doesn't vote because you're dismayed at how corrupt the system we have is, you're part of the problem! Get out and vote! I'm not even asking that you research the candidates or platforms. Just go to a polling location next election and pick a Green or Libertarian! Let's somehow give both the presidential candidates from the Greens and Libertarians in 2016 over 5% of the vote each. If you usually vote Democrat, check the box next to the Green party candidate and split their vote. If you usually vote Republican, check the box next to the Libertarian party candidate and split their vote. No, the Libertarians are most certainly not analogues to Republicans and from what little I know of the Greens they too are not analogues to Democrats, but that's not the point. Force the establishment, by their own rigged rules, to wake up and pay attention!
It's the only way to send a message that will be heard.
If young people would muster the same kind of turnout as old folks and put the power of their vote behind "3rd" parties instead of the entrenched and corrupt establishment, we'd legalize cannabis, tax it, and find others ways to increase revenues; end the wars on terror and drugs and find other ways to decrease spending; and we'd start having some kind of actually functional debate about what to do about health care and income disparity tomorrow instead of helplessly weathering more petulant tactics like shutting the government down and fillibustering appointments and more paternalist lines like telling us that we need to pass a law to find out what it says.
