So what this bill does is nullifies parts of the Health Care Reform Act (were it to somehow actually pass) and would:
1) Prohibit any fine or penalty on anyone or any company for deciding to purchase health care directly.
2) Doctors and healthcare providers would remain free to accept those funds and provide those services.
3) Overrules anything that prohibits the sale of private health insurance in Arizona.
4) Overrides any law that requires individuals or employers to participate in any particular health care system.
You basically get some of your rights back that should have never been taken away by the Federal Bill in the first place, if you live in Arizona, that is…
There’s been a lot of controversy over the proposed Health Care Reform that’s currently in the Senate and House and the plans proposed by President Obama. Certain sections are not really controversial anymore when States, such as Arizona, begin to consider and pass legislation like Arizona HCR2014: National Health Care Nullification.
If you care about your freedom of choice in America; here’s why you’ll support it, and push for it to be included in your state legislation. You may even want to write your current federal senators and members of congress a letter expressing your concern.
HCR2014 nullifies several unsonctitutional proposals that are mandated by the Feds Health Care Reform Bill in order to protect the rights of its citizens. (The entire reason the federal government was put into place to begin with was to protect our rights, not steal them away)
Under the current proposal.
1) Everyone who has or doesn’t have insurance is required to purchase government approved insurance
How might this impact you?
This may allow you to keep your existing insurance if you have it, it may not, depending on what the government mandates as acceptable insurance. You may have to switch to a plan that covers things you don’t need. If you don’t have insurance, you’ll have to get it, even if you, by choice, don’t want or feel you don’t need it. If you can’t afford insurance, no problem, the government is going to take money from everyone else and help you pay for it, whether or not you need it or will use it.
What does this mean for you as a patient?
If you are a patient (consumer), you may have to begin looking for government approved insurance. The theory is that this insurance will cost less, but the way they are accomplishing this is controversial. Places may stop accepting government approved insurances, kind of like how a lot of places won’t accept medicare or state run programs. This could limit your accessibility to care, it will definitely restrict your choices in providers, you definitely will be paying for insurance on things you might not have chose, and many more things could happen as a result of this.
Why this doesn’t add up to make any sense?
1) What is essentially happening here is they are trying to “spread the risk”.
This means anyone who is young and healthy, or healthy and not young because they made the choice to spend money and time eating right, exercising properly, and not picking up bad habits, will now be paying for people who aren’t young and healthy, who may not have spent time or money doing the things you did to keep healthy.
Everyone knows the majority of medical expenditures in America are on preventable diseases, nearly 100% preventable, depending on what study you read. So now everyone pays for people who may have made bad health choices. You’re paying for that person who drinks 6 cans of Mountain Dew a day, doesn’t exercise, and eats ramen noodles. Or the person who eats 6lbs of steak and is overweight or the person who has smoked all their lives and has a high chance of cancer. Maybe the person who base jumps for a living.
There is no such thing as risk anymore, they just “spread” it. This might make sense if even a small percentage of people in America weren’t sick or getting hurt by their own choices, but that’s not the case. Granted, there are cases where people need medical attention that wasn’t the result of their choices but this is a poor way of addressing the issue.
2) They commonly refer to the car insurance example. People who drive cars have to get car insurance (in most states) whether they want to or not, and somehow, they use this to support the notion that everyone should have health insurance. That’s great! Except they missed out on one improtant factor, people can CHOOSE to drive a car or not, one should simply not be forced to buy insurance because they are alive. That is a violation on so many levels of personal rights, it’s aggravating that they are even considering a mandate for people who are alive to have to buy health insurance.
Imagine if they forced everyone to buy car insurance, whether they had a car or not, based on the assumption that some day they will need to get one. That is no different than the Health Insurance Mandate.
3) They also like to refer to the 40 million uninsured and cost of emergency room visits on uninsured, as if those have any real factor on health care costs. Yes, there are 40 million people who don’t have insurance, but would it surprise you to know that a lot of those are by choice? Did you also know that of those 40 million people who don’t have insurance, that they are counting illegal immigrants as well? And when they talk about unpaid emergency room visits they are mainly referring to illegal immigrants, as most people without insurance pay cash for their emergency room visits? How does mandating US Citizens have health insurance help the people who aren’t even US Citizens get it to cover their own costs?
Essentially, we’d be paying for illegal immigrants health care as well with this mandate. The other part is they make it seem like unpaid medical expenses increase health care costs. Of the estimated $2 trillion plus that’s spent every year on Health Care in the United States, a 2001 study found that $35 billion went to uncompensated care. Let’s assume that the $35 billion was spent on US Citizens only, which we know it’s not, that results in 1.75% of the total spending or less. So the solution to cut Health Care costs is to focus on something that is 1.75% of the expenditure? Get real. In 2007, at least 75% of the total money spent on Health Care was spent on diseases that were either preventable or reversible. Yes, 75%, over 1.5 trillion dollars. Do you think that using common sense, maybe focusing on that type of problem may actually cut down on Health Care spending in the United States?
4) You do not simply control costs of health care by lowering insurance premiums. The way the government is accomplishing lowering the costs of health care is not simply by cutting costs, but telling the providers what they will pay for certain things, like Medicare already does. This is also why people do not accept Medicare always. They simply lose too much money. The government somehow thinks it has the right to say I will pay you $50 for this Playstation 3. It’s not a negotiation of any kind, it’s more like “this is what I’m going to give you”. Even if that Playstation 3 costs $500, the government doesn’t care. If the providers accept the insurance, they most likely write it off as a loss, and they have to have enough non-medicare patients to cover that loss. If everyone was on Medicare, you would not get cheaper health care, you would get less quality health care, and way less availability as most of the hospitals would go out of business or bankrupt.
5) If those reasons aren’t enough, then there’s this other thing called the constitution that prohibits the government from making it mandatory that a US Citizen purchase anything.
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