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.

Last Thursday, a funny thing happened in our House of Representatives.

The House passed an amendment to a bill saying no federal funds may ever go to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, otherwise known as ACORN.  ACORN itself is an umbrella organization of groups that help the poor, including doing voter registration drives, helping people access benefits, find jobs and housing, etc.  You may have heard some insane rhetoric about ACORN being Obama’s shock troops or whatever, as if the poor and powerless are a threat.  As if there is a threat to this country outside Wall Street.

Nevermind that Wall Street has an open account at the treasury, measuring in the trillions, and ACORN has received 53 million dollars from the federal government over the past fifteen years. Stack a handful of fraudulent voter registrations (which are bad) against the hundreds of millions of our money poured on K Street by Goldman Sachs and AIG, and you tell me which one has more influence on our political discourse.

So what’s funny about this amendment?

First of all, federal money isn’t distributed to individual organizations by Congress itself.  It’s not as if someone in Congress decides the United Way gets X amount, Raytheon gets Y amount, etc.  They have competitive bids for projects, or sometimes hand out no bid contracts.  But the budgeting and contracting is done by the agencies or states receiving the cash, not the Congress itself. For example, the State Department, not Congress, hired the Wackenhut guards that were recently caught drinking vodka out of each other’s butts.

The contracting process is supposed to be a level playing field, and the choice is supposed to be based on merit, not political affiliation.  The federal government has passed laws saying, for example, anyone receiving their dollars cannot practice discrimination in hiring and that sort of thing  But it’s highly irregular for them to order that their money not go to a specific organization.  (And there’s a good reason for this, as we’ll see below).

Now the Senate version of the this amendment is a little more tame.  It says that no organization under federal indictment can receive federal money, and “ACORN counts as an organization.”  Oh yeah, that’s actually in the amendment.  It specifically says an organization, ACORN, is an organization.  It doesn’t list all the organizations in the world to point out they are organizations.  Only ACORN is named, and for no apparent reason other than political spite and to confer perceived guilt of imagined crimes.

But the House bill outright says no money can go to ACORN.  It’s actually self defeating.  Time and effort will be wasted by other organizations trying to do the things ACORN was going to do anyway.  It’s not that Congress doesn’t want there to be free tax advice for the poor, it’s just dirty, filthy ACORN can’t be involved.

This is the reason money isn’t distributed directly by Congress, because insane political nonsense in Washington could seriously hamper efforts to spend the money effectively on the ground.  I thought the people who hated ACORN didn’t want Washington getting involved in local affairs.  Don’t we know best how to spend money, not Congress?

I know what you’re saying, “What the heck is funny about this?”  Remember PLS 101?  Here is a refresher:

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, Limits on Congress, forbids Congress to pass Bills of Attainder.  Article I, Section 10 also forbids the states to pass Bills of Attainder, so you know they are a big deal.  What are they?

Bill Of Attainder is a legislative Act which declares a person or group as guilty of any crime, there by ordering punishment to them, without allowing them a chance to represent their cause or an unbiased trial to determine whether they are guilty.

Remember innocent until proven guilty?  Bills of Attainder were a cute way for the legislature to circumvent annoying “due process” constraints in the courts.  They would simply declare people criminals and punish them.

Bear in mind ACORN isn’t even under investigation, let alone under indictment, let alone convicted of anything.  People who in ACORN organizations were submitting fraudulent voter registrations in the past and it was ACORN who turned them in.  Even if they were under indictment now, they are innocent until proven guilty.  Even if convicted, Congress has no business singling them out in legislation.  Punishment is for the courts, not Congress.  Congress could only address all convicted groups as a class.  They can’t show preference or prejudice to this or that particular group.

Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York nailed it:

The Supreme Court has ruled a bill of attainder is a legislative act that, no matter what their form, applies either to named individuals or to easily ascertainable members of a group in such a way as to inflict punishment, and then without a judicial trial. That’s exactly what this amendment does.

It may be that ACORN is guilty of various infractions, and if so, it ought to be investigated, maybe sanctioned, whatever, by the appropriate administrative agency or maybe by the judiciary. Congress must not be in the business of punishing individual organizations or people without trial.

Eh, short sighted stupidity in Congress.  Violating the Constitution they claim to revere for the sake of scoring political points.  Not funny enough for you?

The amendment was passed and added to the House bill on September 17.

September 17?

The 222nd anniversary of the signing of the Constitution?  Constitution Day?