|
It's just that right now, there are two primary paths to possessing health insurance-- employer provided group insurance policies and personal, individual contracts with insurance providers. Most Americans rely on the former, if I'm not mistaken, and certainly most get the best value they're likely to get from group policies. My insurance costs me less than $100/month and it's decent, if not great. Buying the same policy myself would likely cost me more than ten times as much, and all my current health problems would be excluded as "pre-existing conditions," rendering the policy virtually worthless.
But that's the situation MANY more people will be in if a private mandate is included in any HCR bill. Without incentives to provide relatively inexpensive group coverage to employees, many more folks will find themselves paying much more for much less, especially if it is illegal to not do so.
One of the reasons I support single payer universal health care for all Americans, along the lines of the Canadian model, is that it solves that problem by both taking away the employer incentive to provide for-profit insurance AND protects citizens from having to bear the brunt of paying for vastly inflated health insurance costs that subsidize executive and investor profits first. I want publicly supported health care, period. But failing that, the individual mandate in the current HCR bills is an absolute disaster that will unfold over the course of a couple of years as corporations discover that they no longer have to bear the costs of insuring a healthy work force.
|