The health care debate - what is being missed.

I have been reading articles, other blogs, and comments to both discussing and arguing the issue from nearly every aspect. Some claim that opposition to the current health care reform bills floating about the House and Senate (well, the Senate anyway, most 'other' health care bills are dead in the House since the passing of HR3962.) is tantamount to denying health care to those without insurance. Far from it! Nobody in the USA goes without health care unless they choose to not follow the systems in place for persons without some personally supplied or contracted means of paying for that care. The current proposals believe the way to make this 'better' is to provide insurance to 'everyone' However....

Here we go!

The biggest single item being totally overlooked is what insurance really is. We have begun to look at insurance as a way to control costs, it was never intended to be such a instrument. Insurance as a financial instrument is intended to assist an entity in mitigating risk of unknown or unforeseen losses. With health care that means that insurance, as a financial instrument, will cover some or all of certain costs which could not be budgeted for due to outside influences.

The confusion started when health care insurance carriers began covering well checks as a means of decreasing risk to them. It became a welcome trade off to pay for an annual examination when the cost of the examinations was forecast to be less than the money saved due to earlier diagnosis of illness and other ailments.

Fast forward to the late 1990's. The average American now sees insurance as a system with which to set contracted rates for their next years health care. The feeling of entitlement begins to become the norm. Health care insurance is no longer seen as a financial instrument to mitigate risk but as a tool to control every cost aspect of health care.
Lets make an analogy to car insurance. Would you file a claim each time you needed an oil change? Of course not! How about when it's time for new tires? Ridiculous? Of course it is! Those are expenses that should be planned and budgeted for. Now I realize that driving a car and having assistance in curing illness are not on the same level, by all means everyone deserves to be treated when ill or injured. The problem comes in that our government, no matter how well intentioned it may be, cannot make one person stronger by making another weaker. In other words, you cannot bring up the standard of living for a poor person by bringing down the same standard for a rich person. What eventually takes place is loss of motivation. When I work 60 hour weeks so that my kids can have braces in addition to the good health care I have worked for, I see a return on my investment in hard work. As a human being with a need for motivation, most of us will cease to work as hard when we do not see a corollary return on our work investment. As that lack of return continues we all cease to work as hard which lowers the national GDP and also lowers the income to the government coffers. As that income is lowered so is the source of funds that was intended to improve the poor persons position and the end result is that everyone is worse off than before the process started. Hence, nobody gets a better position and the poor person is not made stronger in any way.

All of this is simplified and some could successfully argue that it is over simplified and they would be accurate however a detailed discourse on the subject would be longer than the health care bill that our legislators have failed to read before passing it. My intent here is to portray a fair picture of the problems with socialization and no matter how you slice, cook, or examine it the current bills on the House and Senate floors are calls for socialized health care and will not work.