I just ran into an article in the Huffington Post that fines will be imposed for Americans who do not buy health insurance under the new health care "reform."
My wife and I have been without health insurance for many years now and my plan has been to keep it that way if the whole health reform thing turns into a train wreck. We'll just wait until we're eligible for medicare if that's what it takes. Unless our income raises sharply in the near future, it is just out of reach for us.
Let me explain why this kind of reform both scares me and really pisses me off.
If we are required to pay for a health insurance plan and fined if we don't don't do it, we will be forced onto the bleeding edge of financial disaster. We don't have an extra $15K to $19K (or more) to spend each year that is just lying around. I think we're fairly typical in this regard.
My wife and I are both self employed, which means we have no employer to cover half of the expense for us. We make too much money to qualify for any relief program that might come out of Congress, but we don't make enough to have a cushion. We're old enough to pay a lot for our insurance. Congress looks at income as the sole determiner in how much someone can pay for health insurance, but that's like looking at gross receivables in a company to determine whether they are profitable. It doesn't tell nearly enough of the story.
It's easy to see where our money goes: We spend $4,000 a month on our mortgage and taxes and $1,000 a month to supplement my mother-in-law so she can afford an apartment. The high mortgage is not at all unusual for where we live, it's part of living on the San Francisco Peninsula. There is not much left over at the end of the month. We do live in a great neighborhood with wonderful neighbors and have no intention of leaving. Besides, all my clients are in this area.
My truck is over 15 years old and my wife's car is 13. The vehicles have almost 400,000 miles logged between them. There's not enough money for a lot of new stuff. It's been many years since we've had a real vacation. We only buy clothes when we start looking like we just jumped out of a boxcar in the Great Depression.
This is not a complaint. We're solvent. We can pay our bills and not worry at the end of each month. I'm grateful as hell for that. We've had our brush with disaster. I'm only showing that we're not making frivolous choices with our money. We spend it only when we have to.
And there is no extra for the high cost of crappy health insurance. Instead, my wife and I see a chiropractor at our own expense as a sort of tune up, we eat well and I'm damned careful on my job as a handyman. (Remember Joe the Plumber? I'm Craig the Handyman. Only I'm a Democrat, my name is really Craig and I'm really a handyman and actually licensed.)
This is where I get angry and frustrated because someone is Washington is going to decide that I MUST have enough money to pay for this because I am in a certain income bracket.
I don't think that I am alone in this. I can well imagine that millions of Americans are in the same place: we manage our money, live a simple life, and our reward for this is possibly being forced to buy an overpriced, ineffective health care plan that will ruin our carefully planned finances and push us to the edge. What about the people who are even closer to the edge? I swear, sometimes I feel like Washington must be on another planet.