Find the most unlikely place to take a stand, the more absurdly indefensible the better. That’s where you find radical reactionary Republicans planting their flag.
Now they’ve taken up a position defending the manufacture and sale of hazardous products to consumers because, "dagnabbit, this is still Murricah where you people have the God-given right to own dangerous goods that perform in unpredictable ways and if they leave a mark, well then, fuckyeah."
An appeal to reason is a waste of breath when dealing with this mentality.
You see “junk insurance,” and that just makes your Republican opponent love it all the more as if it was a cute, furry animal.
To you, ten essential areas of coverage are a feature of the new health insurance policies. To Republicans they’re a bug. List them and they just tell which ones they don’t need.
- Outpatient care
- Emergency care
- Hospitalization
- Maternity and newborn care
- Mental health services
- Prescription drugs
- Rehabilitative and habilitative services
- Laboratory services
- Preventive and wellness services
- Pediatric services
Before you know it, you find yourself in the Republican rabbit hole where the tea parties never stop.
According to their "logic," the "gubmint" "takeover of healthcare" will burden them with unnecessary areas of coverage that others will use while they foot the bill.
To these people, freedom's just another word for the $1.98 policy they used to have.
If they had a valid concern, it would be a first. But as usual, they have only nonsense. I'm here to help you see through it.
Insurance plans were never customized and tailored to the individual preferences of each policyholder. No one ever had the option of including or excluding specific types of care to match their personalized needs. People who object to having the ten essential areas of coverage are objecting to the idea of insurance itself.
Having standardized health insurance coverage and making it mandatory resolves the problem that health providers have when they can't collect payment for their services.
According to Think Progress:
When the uninsured cannot pay for the care they receive, health care providers shift costs to Americans with insurance in the form of higher premiums.
Cost shifting involves underinsured individuals as well as the uninsured. Individuals with gaps in the coverage provided by their policies also leave unpaid bills that providers aren't able to collect which adds to the cost shifted to the insured who are able to pay. Standardized coverage eliminates free riders throughout the system. It minimizes the burden of uncollected medical bills which has been spread across the population of consumers until now.
Of course Republicans reject the solution for the problem that bothers them, redistribution of their riches to undeserving recipients.
Google search "cost shifting." It seems an awful lot of tea party Republicans are cost shifting deniers. Instead, they believe that their insurance premiums subsidize the cost of healthcare for other individuals who pay premiums too. In other words, even insurance is now a Socialist plot to the Regressives. The media reinforces this suspicion with its superficial reporting about the composition of participants in group insurance needed to make it economically viable.
A more traditional view of insurance, without the ideological coloring, is that it is simply a mechanism for transferring your risk of financial ruin due to illness to an entity that can afford to carry it for you, for a price.
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