Dear Editor:
If you choose not to publish the following, I understand. It's way too long, and I also work as a stringer for The Republic from time to time covering sports for Jay Heater. However, the article from Diana Wagman provided inspiration to me to create the following. If nothing else, I hope you find it interesting:
Diana Wagman’s article presents her hopeful but naïve desire to support the Affordable Care Act as a promising solution to her own family’s health insurance challenges. In many ways my own family shares a very similar scenario with Wagman’s: Both my wife and I are self-employed and therefore do not have access to employer-sponsored insurance benefits.
The difference between Wagman and me is our opposite views of the role of government in the larger dilemma of health insurance. She can’t imagine any solution that does not involve the federal government, while I believe the federal government is the last place in which anyone should want to rely for their family’s healthcare.
Wagman and I belong to the same generation, her frame of reference coming from a working life spent in the public sector. Mine has almost entirely been in the private sector, where I have experienced firsthand the silly regulations and associated extortion-like taxes dreamed up by bureaucrats from Washington and Indianapolis.
My personal experience with healthcare can be summarized as follows:
1. Shortly after forming my new corporation, I discovered that nobody in the private insurance industry would sell me health insurance at any price. My spouse and I were accused of the dreaded “pre-existing conditions”, sort of like modern lepers. Those conditions have never impeded our ability to go to work every day, and certainly don’t mean we go to doctors very often. But still, we found out that insurers will accept only those in perfect health – although we can’t be sure that if those past health issues never happened that we still wouldn’t have been rejected for some other equally nonsensical reason.
2. Indiana came to the rescue with the “high-risk”insurance pool called ICHIA. We could buy insurance that was certainly a budget stretcher, but at least gave us some peace of mind that if we got seriously injured or contracted a life-threatening disease we’d be covered.
3. Over the years two events happened in Washington that significantly impacted our healthcare costs. First was the Medicare Prescription Drug program. The day after it passed, the price of our prescription refills doubled. Later the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) passed, and they doubled again.
4. This year I received a letter from ICHIA informing me that at the end of this year, my policy will be cancelled. The letter said I must enroll in an “Insurance Exchange” by the end of 2013. By the way, the notice was followed up immediately after by one that informed me my premium had doubled.
So please explain to me, exactly how is it that the Affordable Care Act was designed to “help” people like us get affordable health insurance coverage? Among the articles I’ve found on the ACA that attempt to predict the cost of premiums in the “Exchange”, I’ve seen estimates of increased premiums in 2014 ranging from 30 percent (mostly from hopeful Democrats like Wagman) to 500 percent (mostly from Obamacare opponents). My reasoned prediction is that the actual increase will be between 50 and 100 percent over the premium I pay today (which, remember, is double last year's).
There seems to be nobody predicting my premiums will go down or even stay the same. How could they, with the thousands of new bureaucrats hired in Washington to administer the program and all of those mandates (Mandatory acceptance, free birth control, free screenings, keeping your adult children who can't find a job or afford to pay their student loan payments on your plan, and even paid community-organizer “Navigators” to help me figure out which insurance to buy from the Exchange)?
Don't forget the matter of conscience. As a practicing Roman Catholic, I have a pretty big problem with paying health insurance premiums that will be used to fund "free" contraception and abortifacent drugs. It seems abusive to force me through those high premiums to fund hormonal drugs that cause all sorts of maladies in women, including breast cancer. Not to mention denying a newly conceived child a chance at experiencing this life the rest of us take for granted. The government may disagree with my deeply held convictions, but does their disdain for my faith-inspired (and science-inspired) repect for life give them license to force me to violate them?
My message to Wagman, President Obama, Kathleen Sebelius, and the rest of the progressives who so badly feel a need to manage my personal healthcare is this:
Please, leave me alone!
All I ever wanted from the first day I became my own boss was to find and purchase a simple Major Medical plan. Hopefully one that doesn’t cost half of my annual gross revenue. I’ll cover my own routine doctor visits and medications. Come to think of it, if everybody else adopted the same approach, wouldn’t that put pressure on exorbitant medical costs to gradually shrink to more affordable levels for everyone? Wouldn’t it lead everyone like me who’s shopping for the highest quality care for the lowest reasonable cost inspire providers to compete a little bit more on their prices?
Mrs. Wagman instead longs for the opposite of what I wish for: Single-payer, nationalized, taxpayer-funded healthcare for everyone. May I propose an experiment: Grant her a universal single-payer plan in California for 5 years. Indiana gets my proposed Major Medical-only approach over the same period. Let’s find out which works better at the end of 5 years in terms of access, affordability, and quality.
I’m betting on Indiana.
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