What happens if you have no insurance for 20 years, and never get sick. Then you sign up for insurance and pay your bills for 5 years. Then you get sick. What is the fine, and what happens if the person doesn't have the money to pay it at this point?
Do you even understand this question? What happens if I purchase insurance for 2 months and get sick. It doesn't matter, I purchased the insurance just the same as if I purchased it 20 years ago.
However, for whatever reason the government choosing your insurance policy turned people off, so instead we have a tax that people without insurance have to pay. The problem is that the tax is way too low, so for those who are young and healthy it just makes sense to pay the tax.
The problem is the tax is a penalty with no due process administrated by the one organization in the government that can make your life a living hell if you attempt to object to it. Nowhere in the law is the penalty called a tax either. The Obama administration actually argued it wasn't a tax when people took the mandate to court and one justice on the supreme court declared it a tax so it would be constitutional. But all that ignores that the tax is a punitive tax- it is applicable only if you fail to do something. All other federal income taxes are based and you get deductions or exemptions for doing something. This entire premise that the government can call a penalty a tax and continue to administer it as a penalty is an affront to freedom and everything in the bill of rights not to mention the US constitution. Start with the 9th amendment and then look at the others like the right to due process, the right to a jury trial, the right to freedom of religion.
This is INSURANCE. The whole point of insurance is that you don't know when you'll need it, so you pay money now so that in the event you need it you know you'll have it. I "waste" money on fire insurance every month. My house will probably never burn down, and thus I'll probably never get anything back. However, if my house does burn down, then I get a new house for very little money.
And some people do not and will not need it. Why are they forced to pay for it when they do not want to? Why are normal law abiding citizens being told they are no longer free and must do as the government says and purchase something from a third party when they do nothing wrong? You can waste your money all day long, why must you insist I waste mine too? What happens when some gun nut tea party gets elected and declares that anyone who doesn't own a gun has to pay a $2000 a year penalty?
The only way to allow people to not buy health insurance is if we as a society refuse to provide care for them when they get sick unless they can pay the full bill themselves. If we were all sociopaths that system would work just fine, and people WOULD buy insurance because they would understand the consequences if they didn't.
lol.. so the last 200+ years of this country didn't happen and everything starts right now because you though of something you pretend is the only possible logic?
They would call 911 with chest pains, the call center would be set up to do an automatic insurance/credit check, and the guy on the phone would tell them that if they'd like an ambulance they need to get somebody else to provide a credit card number if the credit check isn't good. That isn't the society most voters want to live in.
And that happens every day in the previous 200+ years of our country's existence? Am I right or are you making things up in order to justify your worldview?
And such issues don't cost that much money to treat or are incredibly rare, which is why regular insurance plans don't cost that little. What was your plan if you got diabetes or kidney failure? Is that when you sign up for the $110/month plan and stick everybody else with the bills since you didn't pay the $80/month they paid for the previous 20 years when you weren't sick?
How is signing up for a more expensive plan sticking everyone else with the bill? There is your logic flaw, if I purchase insurance, they do actuary studies and quote my prices based on my factors. It has nothing to do with you paying my expenses. Insurance is not some bank you put money into in order to get billions out later when you need medical care and that billions will disappear if someone else gets sick. I think someone has fooled you or something.
You have a very nice local hospital. Most would have given you a steep discount and charged you only $50. However, no insurance company would pay the $95 - there is a good chance they might not even pay the $22 (though as I said you got a decent deal). Usually the hospital cash discounts are actually more expensive than what the insurance company pays, because the insurance company can basically shut the hospital down if they don't like the rate. I don't have a bill that just covers A1C, but a bill I recently paid included a $71 (list price) A1C test in a set of tests that cost $286 total, and the cost to me and the insurance was $47. That is pretty typical - insurance companies only pay 20% of the list price for most things. When the hospital cuts 60% off the bill for a cash customer they love to go on about the deal they got, even though they paid twice what most people pay.
And you would be wrong there too. Hospitals inflate their costs to the consumer severely for several reasons. Those reasons all resolve back to the government being involved in the first place. The first problem starts with the HMO act of 64 or 68. It set up and established where medicare and medicaid payments would be payed out on a regional average of costs per procedure instead of the actual billed costs. The country was divided into 5 economic sectors and an average cost was developed and hospitals that took medicare and medicaid (which is more than half their business) had to take the average as payment in full. Congress did this to address that unexpected costs of medicare and shortly after, the started paying only a percentage of the averaged costs in order to try and save more money. Medical facilities started increasing their prices in order to raise the average costs up and insurance companies cried so congress exempted discounts to costs from the averaging and took the actual charged costs into account. This allows the hospitals and other medical facilities to jack the costs up while keeping insurance providers happy because they could give them steep discounts. But then another incentive kicked in which is taxes. If the medical facility gives a certain amount of charitable write offs each year, they get a tax break. So the inflated amounts count towards this when they write off bad debt for non-payment. This is why when you offer to pay cash, you get their corporate discount, a cash discount and an early payment discount which I am told is standard to all customers who pay before 30 days.
You're missing the point of insurance. You're not paying for your current medical condition. You're paying for when you do (or don't) get diabetes, or kidney disease, or cancer.
I'm not missing the point at all. I'm saying do not penalize someone when they have not done anything wrong. Don't make freedom illegal either.
I pay more than your health insurance bills every year for fire insurance on my house (a rather modest one at that). I spend $0 on repairs caused by fire. Sounds like I'm getting ripped off! Except, if my house burns down when I'm age 55 I won't be homeless for the rest of my life, or dependent on my fellow taxpayers for welfare or charity.
Most likely you are paying that because you had to barrow money to purchase the house. Either way it doesn't matter because for what ever reason it is what you chose to do with your money. I didn't demand you purchase fire insurance, I didn't demand you buy the house. What makes you think you can demand I spend my money a certain way when I cost you nothing, have no loans with or without conditions from you nor do I really care about you in any way? Why are you so greedy that you think if I don't have insurance there might be a chance I might not be able to cover my own treatment and you might have to pay slightly more for coverage so I must without ever indicating I couldn't provide for myself, spend my money the way you want me to? That's pretty selfish of you isn't it?
Not buying insurance IS the thing they actually did wrong. An involuntary action can't be right or wrong - it just "is." So, getting sick can't be the thing that somebody does wrong. The time to pay for illness is BEFORE you're sick, not after.
Not buying insurance can never be the wrong. The entire you have to spend your money a certain way is what is wrong. People get sick and pay for themselves all the time. People will continue to get sick and pay for it themselves even after this freedom hating law is fully in place. That is because the deductibles are so outrageous in some cases, it will surpass most people's medical needs.
Plus, lots of people may go through live for 70 years and never get sick, and then get hit by a truck and die on the scene. The way insurance works is that they pay for it all their life and never get a dime. Then some other poor kid gets leukemia at the age of 6 and the insurance company pays $20k/yr on medical bills for the next 40 years. It all works out, since the insurance costs are based on statistics. However, it doesn't work out when people only want insurance when they "need" it.
lol.. then penalize only those without that need it.
Would it make sense for me to not pay for fire insurance for 20 years, then have a fire, and have society come along and spend $150k building me a new home, and then try to fine me for it?
OF course it wouldn't. Society doesn't rebuild your home, your insurance would. Society other then some people purchasing policies at their own discretion has nothing to do with you having insurance or not or the outcome of a fire outside of paying for fire fighting that we do through taxes whether you had insurance or not.
What happens if I don't have $150k, or even the total of 20 years worth of premiums? Plus, the insurance company is out more than 20 years worth of premiums - they're out the premiums from all the other people who didn't pay and whose houses didn't burn down (but which they apparently have to repair anyway).What's your point. If they offer insurance and you just built your house and only payed the insurance for 2 months, you would be in the same boat. It's a risk the insurance company takes when it offers coverage and they employ actuaries that mitigate that risk. They are surprisingly good at it too.
Insurance premiums are based on most people paying and never collecting for most types of insurance. If you only charge people who do collect, then you'll have to charge them a LOT more.
Who said anything about charging only people who collect from insurance? 85% of the population had coverage before the ACA became law, we were only talking about needing to get around 45 million people covered or 15% of the population who either couldn't afford health insurance or didn't want it. What in this world makes you think that those 85% or 270 some million people would all the sudden cancel their insurance when they didn't cancel it before the law mandated it?
You are working from a lot of assumptions that don't seem to fit with reality.