All Americans should have access to affordable healthcare and no one should be denied coverage by health insurers because they are sick. It’s a great ideal, but how great an idea is it in reality?

Time to buy some full coverage insurance!

Under the latest Senate bill, all Americans will be required to buy health insurance or else pay a penalty. In exchange, health insurers will not be allowed to deny people coverage based on pre-existing conditions or charge those people any more than they do everyone else. Okay, so the idea is to increase the amount of people paying in so insurance companies can afford to take care of the sick people. Nice idea (although I question the constitutionality of forcing people to buy a product they do not want, but that is fodder for another day).

However, the penalty in the Senate bill, according to The Miami Herald, is only $750 per person up to $2,250 per year, per family.

Imagine you are a young, healthy twenty-something working a decent job. Now, you could either pay $150 a month for health insurance with a $1,000 deductible, or you could just pay the $750 penalty at the end of the year. Which do you think most healthy people are going to pick?

Besides, if you do get gravely sick, you can just go buy some coverage and pay the premiums and deductible (also a capped affordable amount) and have the insurance company pick up the rest of the tab for treatment. If you have a serious, chronic disease, this could easily cost the insurer hundreds of thousands a year. Again, you can’t be denied coverage for the pre-existing condition, nor be charged more because of it.

Of course, this goes completely contrary to the whole idea of insurance, which is to, you know, plan ahead and pay into a joint fund in the event that you may get sick in the future. Insurance premiums are going to go through the roof for companies to foot this bill, as most people will not start paying in until they actually get sick. Either that, or insurance companies will just exit out of the market altogether and cut their losses.

Let’s take some of the emotion out of the equation and think of this another way. What if Congress proposed a similar initiative involving car insurance?

Now, insurers cannot charge you more for full coverage than anyone else is charged, even if you have a poor driving record and lots of tickets. Better yet, you can just pay a small government penalty rather than buy insurance.

However, if you get in a serious wreck, you can just go down to the insurance company and they will have no choice but to write you a full coverage policy even though your car is already totaled. You pay a couple grand in deductible and a month of coverage and they pay the price to replace your car. How does that make any sense? Yet that is essentially what we are proposing with healthcare reform. How is that sustainable in the long run?

Affordable healthcare for everyone where you can’t be denied coverage is a great ideal, but implementing it is ultimately unsustainable and thus illogical. We need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a real solution to this problem.

I feel pretty drained right now. I’ve been turning out writing at a pretty good clip. Some pals and I are going to shoot a movie I wrote called “Live and Let Spy.” That should be in internet form for consumption in a few months. It’s pretty short too, so no excuse for not seeing it!

I feel like the writing part of my brain is on auto-pilot, and is doing pretty good. But the political part is numb. The fire has kinda petered out. I don’t know how some of these people can keep at it day in and day out. It’s exhausting. I kept thinking maybe I need a better system to organize my time and effort and what not in order to get more articles and the like, but maybe I only have one a month in me.

Like the Schumer amendment, which would have given us a gimpy public option in the finance committee bill. It lost because of three Democratic senators. Those Senators are from North Dakota, Arkansas, and Montana. Each of those states has less than a million people. Combined, they are less than 1 percent of the population. Those states are all less than 30th in GDP, compared to other states.

I’d be cool with Senators having so much power, 6 year terms, filibuster, etc, if they were smarter and more responsible than most House members, but Senators are just as dumb as any other legislator. At this point, states are just arbitrary political organizations. Why should the 600,000 people in Montana get as much say as the 20 million in New York? Because of lines drawn on a map 100 years ago?

But, honestly, I’m not that pissed about it, not pissed enough to actually try to convince other people. If anyone objects to my analysis here, I’d just think, “Sure, whatever.” I mean, this seems so obvious to me that it doesn’t make sense to argue for it. It’s like arguing for how grass is green.  If someone tries to argue grass is transparent, it doesn’t sharpen your argumentative skills by arguing with them.

But moreover, I don’t want to argue with anyone. I just want to kick back with some beers and not have to face the real world, or the truth. It’s easy to see how post modernists can argue against the existence of reality when you regularly encounter people with views that are so divergent from yours that they don’t make sense. I think we all accept that other people have other opinions, but how is it that other people can have other “facts”?  Other “facts” then build other “realities.”

I posted a screed about healthcare a while back, here and on Facebook. I hoped my sister Colleen, who works in healthcare, would respond. She didn’t for a couple of weeks, so I guessed she didn’t read it or didn’t care. I happened upon that note the other day, and saw that she did reply much later. She wrote one sentence, basically saying she was disappointed at how little I knew about health insurance.

I wonder now if she felt the same way I do. We both have our divergent set of facts, building our own realities, but they are opposed to each other. Rather than try to hash it out, and risk crumbling those realities, we just don’t talk about it. We keep filtering our information so it reinforces our worldviews.

I’ll be back in form soon enough. Just thought I’d try to get some of these thoughts out while I’m here.

Government: “You charge WAY too much and you treat your customers like dirt!”

Health Insurance: “Okay, let’s compromise.  I’ll treat them a little less like dirt if they agree to pay me more money.”

Government: “Awesome!  Helloooo reelection!”

It occurred to me while watching Meet the Press online that I was insane for watching Meet the Press online.   Then it occurred to me that the above dialogue basically explains what, if anything, we’re going to get out of this mess.  If you want a long (but really good and readable) explanation, you should read this article by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi.

The President has all but said (and will say Wednesday night, I predict) that there will be no real public insurance plan, the much bally-hooed public option.  If there is a public option, the blue dog democrats have assured us that it will pay out at rates similar to private insurance (instead of lower medicare plus five rates) so that the playing field is level with insurance.  That also means the public plan would be pointless.  It’s like saying, to level the playing field, homeless shelters have to charge the same as hotels.  Whenever anyone mentions blue dog democrats, imagine a blue dog humping the leg of a health insurance CEO.

But never fear!  There is more to health insurance reform than the public option, right?  That’s the line the White House has been pushing for weeks.  They love mentioning how the bill will keep you from getting turned down for preexisting conditions, and insurance companies won’t be able to kick you off the rolls if you get sick, and they’ll cap out of pocket expenses, and they won’t be able to arbitrarily raise premiums multiple times in one year, and you might even be able to keep your insurance if you “switch jobs.”  In other words, the health insurance companies are going to have to treat people like human beings instead of bloody sacks of cash to be drained up and thrown out.

How is this real change?  Gee, you make the industry that has caused this health care crisis stop a few of it’s more egregious, blood-sucking practices.  Hooray!  A major victory!

But there’s more!  There’s also an individual mandate looming overhead, meaning everyone MUST by health insurance or face a tax penalty.  Health insurance, welcome to 47 million new customers, courtesy of uncle sam!  Forty-seven million Americans, welcome to fly-by-night health insurance, much like the craptastic state minimum car insurance advertised late at night on the CW (not that I watch it).  The only difference between that kind of insurance and no insurance is that you pay to be uninsured.

THIS is reform?  Creating a windfall for the industry that screwed things up?  Exponentially increasing the overhead and the paperwork logjam that is strangling health care?

But here’s the best part.  No denials for pre-existing conditions?  No kicking people off when they get sick?  Keeping insurance if you lose your job?  These all KEEP people on the insurance rolls.  Wow, tough reforms.  Really sticking it to the people that stuck it to us.  Insurance companies will get to pass these costs on to the public via the mandate, or subsidies from tax money that will support the mandate.  No wonder PhRMA, the drug lobby, is spending 140 million to SUPPORT reform.  They took a lesson from Wall Street about socializing losses and privatizing gains.

It’s a win, win, win all around for insurance, and lose lose for Americans.  We’ll pay more and get less.  And the added bonus?  This plan can properly be called “Universal Health Care,” forever sullying the name of the only system that makes sense, and the system every other industrialized country in the world has, and the system that veterans, the elderly, and the very poor have right now, single payer.

The liberals have done it again. We’ve offended those poor, persecuted right-wingers. This time, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the recent outbursts at health care-related town meetings “un-American.”

First of all, what a stupid thing to say. What, exactly, is un-American? Not all bad is un-American. The United States has a very seedy history. Slavery, oppression of women and minorities, all of the nonsense wars we’ve fought just to name a few. To call an interruption “un-American” is to put the blinders on and pretend that everything “American” is good. Sorry, lady. Wake up and smell the people you govern. We smell freshly of soap, but only because some third-world child slaves away in a sweatshop for pennies a day so we can have cheap clothes.

Then there is the reaction. Typical. Overdone. Just as each Christmas the right pretends they are being persecuted when someone uses “X-mas” or “Happy Holidays” instead of Christmas, the right now claims that Pelosi has crossed the line. Nevermind that the right-wing talking heads say the same thing, often times much worse, when the left makes a reasonable attack. A few years ago, O’Reilly called left-wing protestors Nazis. What they were doing paled in comparison to what is going on right now.

Therein lies the problem here. The right is not being reasonable. It is reasonable to ask questions to gather more information. It is unreasonable to disrupt a meeting just because you disagree. The right offers no proof of any harm from Obama’s proposed health care, just propaganda heard on right-wing radio and television. As per usual, the truth goes out the window with this group, and we are left with nothing more than a bunch of angry, hateful bottom-feeders who vote against their own interest because they eat every word out of talk-radio’s mouth. Who can argue against someone who pulls facts out of the air, gets angry when confronted, and always ends up yelling?

Congressman Henry Waxman was recently on The Daily Show. Jon Stewart made fun of our government, and instead of agreeing with Stewart and showing anger that such a joke could ever be made, Waxman offered some weak rebuttal. Another problem: Congressmen and women who either cannot see the problem or do not have the courage to be adamant about fixing it. Where is the outrage when these clowns invade these meetings or spew their nonsense? Fire a little anger back occasionally. Oh well, it’s not like our health care is on the line or anything.

Just tonight, I watched three guests on Lou Dobbs’ show discuss Pelosi’s comments. At the top, each agreed that her “un-American” comment was un-American in and of itself. Finally, what must have been the brightest in the bunch said he agreed with her comments. Dobbs stuttered a response as if he could not believe someone just admitted on record that he agreed with Pelosi. He asks the man if he really agrees. The man puts the comment back in context and says yes, the behavior very specifically defined by Pelosi is “un-American” and stupid. They went to commercial before Dobbs could say anything else, but it was clear he thought he nailed the guy. The only thing he did was make himself and anyone who agrees with him on this point look terribly sad and naïve.

I used to think “We the people” deserved a better government than the one we have elected. I have since come to disagree with my earlier thinking. A people who cannot separate fact from lousy, emotion-driven fiction does not deserve a working health care system. A people who vote for the same money-hungry politicians who lie to them every chance they get does not deserve a government that works for them.

A few years back, I saw George Carlin on CNN, and realized his dark-humor was not just an act. Carlin unabashedly dismissed all the things I held dear at the time, namely government and humanity. He made a living making humorous the corruption and hypocrisy associated with America and humans in general, but on CNN that day, he made it evident that he really believed those things. At the time, I wondered how anyone could be so cynical. Now I know. Hearing the rhetoric coming from the right since Obama’s election, and seeing so many people believe it has devastated my outlook on humanity.

A girl I recently tried to date said I took things too seriously. Too seriously? Oh honey. We can never be together. No reasonable person could ever take any of this seriously.