There's been a lot of whinging on this site about the current senate HC bill and its mandate that we all buy insurance or be forced to pay a fine.
Some have called it a bailout of the insurance industry, which is nonsense, because you can't call it a bailout if the recipients are already sleeping on giant bricks of cash. Some have railed against it as unconstitutional, and some have gone so far as to say that they won't buy insurance and Obama will have to personally come and throw them in jail.
Whatever. personally, I welcome the mandate, and I look forward to getting fined by the government. Just so long as we make a couple of adjustments....
Now it's a little confusing, to anyone who's been casually watching all this unfold, just who is the biggest douchebag in the democratic party. For a while, the smart money was on Lieberman, but he's not really a democrat so I'm going to have to go with Ben Nelson, who today indicated that he would grudgingly go along with the party, against the better judgment of his insurance overlords.
But, Nelson, during his brief tenure as actual President of the United states (succeeding such notable figures as Olympia Snowe and Joe Lieberman), warned that the bill had better not change substantially in conference or it would lose his support.
So just to be clear, I'm not recommending adjustments that would substantially alter the bill. I get that at this point, it would be crazy to try and sneak in a public option, or any kind of expansion of medicare.
All I'd like is to make sure that the fines imposed on those who refuse to buy insurance are proportional to the offense of not buying insurance, and that they're put to use in dealing with the healthcare needs of this country. That sounds reasonable, right?
As a general rule of thumb, my fines, assuming I make enough money that I'm capable of paying them, should be no more than the cost of insuring me under a reasonable, law-abiding plan. Furthermore, the fines should be imposed monthly, and should go towards providing coverage for someone who doesn't have insurance. And that person should probably be local to me, so that the cost of care corresponds to the market forces in my region. In fact they could just insure me - that's pretty local, right?
Now of course, the government may have to administer the charging of those fees and providing the insurance, so it would behoove them to set up some sort of office, or leverage an existing government outfit that already is equipped to handle that sort of thing, like maybe medicare.