Let’s Blame the Sick People!
During the sub-prime crisis, many people started out by blaming the poor people. You know, the dead beats that could not pay their mortgages. They were the people that tricked the billion dollar banks into giving them mortgages they could never afford, especially those on floating interest rates.
The front page of The Oklahoman reported today that Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland at the Oklahoma Health Summit has diversified the game into blaming the sick people for their lack of health insurance. Her suggestion is that there have to be government imposed penalties on people that do not have health insurance.
Holland believes the sick people really can afford health insurance but prefer to stand in line at emergency rooms to drain state resources and participate in a culture of non-payment of medical bills.
Holland has suggested that season football tickets should be forfeited by those that do not have health insurance (as well as driver’s licenses, hunting and fishing licenses, and, of course, state tax refunds). Her underlying premise is that the sick people really have money and are spending it on everything but health insurance. Holland correctly, however, diagnosed that one third of Oklahomans do not have health insurance, but she thinks it is their fault rather than the Insurance Commissioners’ fault.
Holland has apparently never spoken to anyone in those emergency rooms. She has never spoken to any family that has to pay its own insurance premiums. Holland probably enjoys her health coverage provided by state taxpayers and believes she could trade places with those that do not have state benefits.
Obviously, Holland does not understand the insurance system she is supposed to be regulating. Health insurance in Oklahoma is not affordable, just like everywhere else in the United States, because the insurers cannot solve the cost of health care in this country any better than anyone else. If Holland wants universal health insurance coverage in Oklahoma, she should have the legislature pass a cap law that limits the exposure of health insurers to $500,000 and has the state pick up everything above that on a covered claim. With that limitation on exposure, the price of premiums for health insurance would begin to decline. If they did not decline enough, then the cap could be lowered to $400,000, and so on.
Who would pay for the state’s “above the cap” share of medical expenses? Wrong question. What are we as state taxpayers already paying and would this be better? State tax payers are paying for the medical care of one third of the state’s population from zero. By making health insurance more affordable, and thereby reducing the third to a smaller percentage, by having more people buy insurance, the cost would likely be less.
To work the problem from the other end, the state should make health insurance premium payments for children deductible from state income taxes. That would also increase the number of middle income tax payers that could afford health insurance.
If the Insurance Commissioner needs a funding source, maybe she could propose a special tax on season tickets to OU and OSU football seasons. Maybe she is so smart she could retool the lottery into not only the funding rescue for Oklahoma education, but the funding source for health insurance (or season football tickets for everyone). But, blaming the sick people, or the poor people, for their lack of money, or their lack of fiscal responsibility, is based on the bogus notion that people want to stand in line at the emergency room, want to lose their homes in foreclosure, and are just wastrels and ne’er do wells.
