The Individual Mandate

I guess in this country, in today’s political climate, if you feed somebody a starvation diet of garbage, while you are eating beef steak and caviar, you should be hailed as a savior and a hero because you aren’t letting them starve to death. Thus we have the “Affordable Care Act” which allows, and will soon require, people to spend large portions of their inadequate incomes to purchase health insurance from private corporations.

Obama was opposed to the individual mandate in 2008, of course, and had some rather harsh things to say about it when Hillary Clinton supported it in the campaign. Now he is vigorously defending it in the Supreme Court, but Mitt Romney is the “flip flopper.”

The mandate is supported as being an essential component of ACA, because in order for insurance companies to be able to enroll people who are sick they have to be able to enroll people who are well as a balance. That should not be taken to support the individual mandate, but rather to condemn the ACA as a flawed program which promotes the profitability of insurance companies over the well being of the American people.

This is a country where we create a problem and then, rather than admitting that we made a mistake and undoing it, we create another problem to fix the first, so that we wind up with two boondoggles and double the cost. The “cost shifting” that the individual mandate is supposed to fix was caused by a law passed in 1986 which mandated that any medical facility which received federal funding would be required to treat anyone seeking treatment regardless of their ability to pay.

So first we pass a law encouraging people not to get health insurance and then we have to pass another law that mandates health insurance, because we never foresaw that the first law would result in people not getting health insurance. That is simply awesome.

Future generations are going to look back on this, if they are not cooking over campfires and unable to read, and wonder if this generation even went to school.