I keep saying the same thing over and over again, and Liberals just seem to look at me as if I had two heads sticking up above my shoulders (with nary a brain between them). Problem is, they keep ignoring empirical evidence that, and much more often than they are willing to admit, it IS Government that is responsible for higher and higher healthcare costs.
Here in NH, a law was passed called Michelle’s Law as a result of a young woman who was diagnosed with advanced cancer while in college full time. The problem is that the policy was only in force while she was full time; a condition that turned out to be impossible to keep as her disease and treatment became quite debilitating. NH mandated that this could not happen in the future. The problem in setting policy due to single or rare incidents is that often, that policy decision is not optimal and is often at cross purposes to other rantings.
Like that of "healthcare costs too much". Well, just in my home town, the result of this law is that it raised the insurance premiums of the municipal employees by $30,000 (and with 85 employees, that comes out to be around an additional $350 / employee.
Thus, it could end up raising our property taxes as well as raising our own premiums – a double whack.
But will politicians take their own actions into account when it is time to rant, once again, that healthcare is too expensive?
Naw, because they keep doing that which raises the cost. From OverLawyered:
Mental health “parity” insurance mandate
» by Walter OlsonThis was the week that Congress passed and the President signed a new law requiring that most health insurers (if they cover mental health treatment at all) pay for lots and lots of talk therapy and addiction rehab the same way they pay for lots of angioplasties or appendectomies, in the name of “parity” and “nondiscrimination”. Very optimistically — it won’t be Congress writing the checks — the ten-year cost is projected at only $3.4 billion. (Judith Graham, “Triage”/Chicago Tribune, Oct. 3). Next week lawmakers will go back to complaining that health insurance has become prohibitively expensive and that much of the population is priced out of buying it altogether. Mickey Kaus remembers where we’ve seen this sort of feel-good short-circuiting of underwriting standards before (Oct. 2).
I can promise you, the cost will not be just $3.4 billion.
Shades of what we just went through with this mortgage fiasco – politicians trying to be "feel good, saviors of the millions", who seemingly have NO idea of the economic consequences of their actions, will be making things WORSE – not better.
And for those of you that will now want to heap burning coals on my head for being mean and heartless, how about the sufferers who have just been priced out of the market? Trust me, our politicians have no compassion on them…
