Thursday, March 13, 2008

Health Makes Me Sick: II

Health care in America is a difficult subject to discuss. Everyone has a medical horror story and everyone has seen a medical miracle. We are fortunate to live at a time when so many of the ailments and afflictions that can befall a human body can be fixed, controlled or cured.

We hear the politicians claiming the 10's of millions of Americans that don't have health insurance are entitled to it. I don't know about "entitled" but access really is an issue that should be dealt with.

Here's the deal...

There are government programs that offer health insurance to those who can't afford it. Oddly there are huge piles of unused cash sitting in government bank accounts set aside for these programs. In my state it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Why is that, you just might be inclined to ask???

The truth is they make it so difficult for the potential applicants to comply with the paperwork requirements that they are as likely to say f@%k it as they are to say "where do I sign".

Case in point: my daughter. A 22 year old that is still "thinking" about where she wants to go to college after taking a year off after high school (this is year 3). She can't be on my policy unless she is a full time student. She doesn't make enough at her job and no health care insurance is available anyway. So the government option seemed like a good idea.

It is was an extremely intrusive process and I can guarantee you if it wasn't for my wife dotting all the i's and crossing all t's it would have never went through. My daughter and 90% of people of her age and life experience could not see the daunting process all the way through. We literally submitted the same material 3 times. When the letter came looking for the one piece of paper we had submitted at least 3 times, but this time with a deadline of yesterday, well, we nearly lost it. Simply put it was ridiculous.

So I ask... Why would we want to hand our health care system to the government? What we have isn't perfect, but there are some excellent ideas out there short of socializing the whole thing.

In my own personal experience having educated myself and landing one good job after another I have always been offered a health insurance plan and have had nothing but excellent health care.

If Hillary or Obama get their grubbies on the health care system it will be worse for everyone not better, of this I am convinced.



CW

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