01-25-2013, 09:12 PM
hal wrote:
[quote=Ted King]
I'm not in tune with the "pay more for your health care because you do 'X' in your life." If somebody needs medical care then, sh*t, I say let's give it to them. Everybody pays the same and gets the health care that they need when they need it. I don't feel that way about everything, but I do feel that way about health care.
Now wait a minute here... I'm already paying more because I'm old. If I then elect to put myself further at risk by smoking, I should pay even more.
I CHOOSE to smoke... This isn't about addiction. At some point, you choose to have that first cigarette. You should have stopped there, but you CHOSE to continue.
If you make the case that people are becoming addicted through no fault of their own, then hand the blame to the makers AND REGULATORS of cigarettes.
I understand the sense of fairness and justice that underlies your view. I just think that when you really begin to get fine-grained in looking at how much people should be accountable for their health-cost-increasing choices, what you find is a mess. We went through it in our teacher's union. When I first started teaching, the school district covered the whole cost of our health insurance and there was no differentiating amongst teachers about who bore more responsibility for health care costs. Over time we started sharing the cost of the health care premiums with the district. As those costs to us individually began to go up, at a certain point some teachers began to gripe about having to pay just as much as other teachers who had higher health care costs because of ___________ . Various things that went in the blank: number of kids they had covered, being older, being smokers, being a heavy drinker of alcohol, being severely overweight, etc. The notions of fairness spread out in all kinds of directions and left a lot of hard feelings in its wake. I just kept saying that I thought we should look at it as though we are all in it together and just pay the same. I think that to the degree that you fragment a risk pool, the less effective it is going to be collectively, though many individuals may temporarily benefit from the fragmentation. That's just my view, though; I understand others may not feel that way.