I have been listening to many ideas about the mandate debate and wanted to share a few thoughts with you. Feel free (no, I am not imposing a mandate) to join me below the fold.
I have been both blessed and cursed in my life by being attracted to risk-taking men. God knows that I know better now but when you meet a man his risk-taking comfort zone is seldom readily apparent.
Both of these men were independently employed, either at the time that I met them or within a few years afterwards. Both as I said were risk takers; athletically (skiing, biking, sport motorcycles (aka rice rockets) and the like. They were also risk takers financially and professionally. Both made in the low 100's and this was almost ten years ago now.
Guy A, we'll call him Bill, left his job in engineering to start a business with his family. Within a short timeframe he was bringing home well over 200K. He already owned his home and several vehicles. But did he feel secure enough financially to look after his own health by purchasing health insurance? No. "I'm only 30," he would say, "what health risk do I have?" After two fat years the company went belly up in four months (no one was refinancing mortgages at the time). He had put all of his money back into the company and the depression of it all almost killed him (literally). It took months to convince him to share his depression with his family (he had crazy issues with his dad and refused to let his dad see him like that) although I did go behind his back and tell his sister so that she could help me keep an eye on him. To this day I am convinced that if he had had health insurance his battle with depression would not have gotten to the nail biting level that it did. He did finally go on anti-depressants and receive therapy but it took some doing to get him there. He is recovered now or at least appeared to be the last time that I talked to him. That was five years ago. The stress and anxiety of taking care of him not only destroyed our engagement but it also put me into therapy for months. Thank god that my employer had health insurance.
Guy B, we'll call him Jack, was as aggresive of a risk taker as I have ever met. He also sometimes felt the need to prove how tough he was (and he soo wasn't, hence the need to prove it). Despite a high income from a risk-taking profession he refused to obtain health insurance. The stress of worrying what would happen to him if he ever hurt himself either in his spare time or professionally eventually doomed our relationship. I was sick and tired of badgering him about spending some of his money on himself and he was probably sick of hearing it. A year after we broke up, sure enough, he was shot while serving papers in a divorce case, and spent six months in the hospital recovering. The cost of it was staggering. Did he learn anything from it? No, today he is a private investigator still operating with no health insurance.
Both of these men are also Republicans and I am positive that Jack is threatening mutiny if this thing gets passed and he is forced to buy health insurance. I am quite positive that he is foaming at the mouth right now.
My point is that while I am sure that while no one here in DKland can see themselves in this story, there is a group of people out there; whether it numbers in the thousands or millions I couldn't begin to guess, but there are people out there who need to be forced to pay themselves first. And one of the ways that you do that is to buy insurance. Yes, it mght take you ten or twenty years to need it, but unless you live your life in a bubble, you will need it. These two risk takers thought that buying something that they thought they would never need was the biggest racket in the world. Both of them belittled me every time I suggested it even as they plowed thousands back into their businesses every month. If they could do it all over again under a government that forced them to set aside some of their profit to buy insurance, they might be stronger finacially and maybe even better off physically and mentally. I don't know, but I would like to think so.
I know that some will jump on me and say, well maybe those are two good examples of men who would in the long run benefit from being forced to buy insurance but they shouldn't have to pay Big Insurance Co. for it; well, for now it is a start. If we can get to some other place, great, but for now this is the start of a process, but hardly the end. Thanks for reading.