President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

That cartoon encapsulates the lunacy of the way discussions get framed in this country.

If a parent has health insurance and a kid is born sick. ... that kid is going to be covered by the policy. Always has been, the way health insurance was sold in this country for decades.

Take government out of the mess we have created. If you buy insurance for ANYTHING. ... and an insurable thing happens. ... you are covered. If you stop paying your premiums or let your insurance lapse, you aren't covered. If you give up your homeowners insurance and then a hurricane tears through and destroys your house. ... you can't get insurance AFTER the fact to cover the hurricane.

This is the essence of insurance. But in this country. we have been reduced to having "insurance" discussions, when what people are really talking about are entitlements. Nobody wants to discuss it in terms of what it actually is, though, because then we have to discuss the cost of those entitlements honestly.

 

If a parent doesn't have insurance, the kid obviously isn't going to be insured by a health insurance policy that doesn't exist.

That has nothing to do with the absurd notion that people should be able to buy insurance for something that has already happened (i.e. -- an existing condition) without the expectation that the premiums have to equal the actual cost of treating the insurable event.

If we want to nationalize the costs of health care in this country, let's have that conversation -- the way we once did before the sophistry of this "insurance" BS took over the conversation. But then we are not having an "insurance" conversation -- something inconvenient when people logically ask questions about costs and who has to subsidize whom.

On top of it, people are delusional if at this point they don't realize that 1) Those costs are great today for a variety of reasons from costly medical innovations to moral hazard making it so people have little incentive not to do things like smoke and let themselves get morbidly obese, and 2) the past ways we have tried to nationalize those costs (with the promises that it would give people a free lunch) has made health care even costlier (which was predictable, even though anyone suggesting it gets shouted down).