Healthcare

President Obama's healthcare plan continues to be controversial especially since it passed the congress by such a narrow margin and without a single Republican to support it. Despite this, there is still a huge push for more socialized healthcare like in Canada and Europe. The argument seems valid. People need healthcare in order to survive. The problem is just like with food there is a finite supply of it.

Like with a lot of my political viewpoints, the Army certainly shaped this one too. For all intents and purposed, we have socialized healthcare in the Army. The good thing about it is that if I need to schedule a check up (in the Army, it's mandatory annually), then it is very easy and I don't have to worry about paying for anything. The problem is when there is an actual problem. Yes, not having to pay for it is nice, but just about every soldier in the Army will tell you that it's not that great. If you have a pain in your leg, you can go to the emergency room which could mean waiting for hours or you can schedule an appointment. Since healthcare is free, a lot of people will take full advantage of it. Generally with pain, a doctor will give you some aspirin, tell you to take it easy, and then come back if there is any more pain after a week. Well that pain actually was a fracture and by walking on it, you just made it worse. Because the doctor is overworked and everything is free, in order to offset costs and time, they will usually give you the minimal treatment and send you on your way. In the rest of America, you can get what you are willing to pay for, and if you have insurance, then you just pay a deductible.

Now the American system isn't perfect, but I definitely prefer it over the socialized system we have in the Army. Most soldiers will prefer to see an outside provider for the very reasons I gave. The problem with the American system is now health insurance companies aren't really providing insurance. Since you are basically forced to have some kind of health insurance, it's not really insurance. All this has done is create artificial demand thus skyrocketing healthcare costs making not having insurance a practical death sentence. The way it is supposed to operate is kind of like gambling. You can get your money's worth from an insurance company if bad things happen to you, but if not, then the insurance company is able to make profit. The reason why it's nice, is because it minimizes risk in case of emergencies since not a lot of people may have several thousand or even several hundred dollars on them at a single time. With health insurance being forced to sell to people with pre-existing conditions, this risk pool is further diminished since people with pre-existing conditions know that they will be getting their money's worth from the insurance company.

I'm not unsympathetic to those with pre-existing conditions, but there needs to be a better solution than forcing insurance companies to sell to those people because that is not the function of insurance. Those companies only want to sell to healthy people because the only costs they will incur are emergencies such as broken limbs or catching an illness. The United States already has Medicaid which is supposed to deal with people like this. Instead of creating a new ridiculous draconian healthcare program, just rework what we already have. Nothing annoys me more in the government than government redundancy. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of waste of taxpayer dollars could be eliminated if we cut down on seemingly redundant programs.

I don't know what the future holds with healthcare, but there is no way that President Obama's Affordable Healthcare Act (also known as Obamacare) is going to be sustainable. That fact that it didn't even take effect until after the 2012 elections makes me think that not even the president is confident with his healthcare plan. I can already foresee this being a losing issue for the Democrats in 2016.