I am not going to claim that I know everything about the heathcare system or what they are trying to do to fix it. Frankly what they put in these legislative bills is full of legalspeak and hard for the average person to really understand. What I do know is the healthcare system does need reform but it does not need to be completely overhauled.
There are a lot of people that do not have insurance for one reason or another. Many of these people may not have insurance due to being unemployed and can not afford COBRA. COBRA coverage is outragiously priced and should be done away with. To replace COBRA the government should tie insurance coverage into unemployment insurance. This would allow people to continue coverage for as long as their unemployment insurance lasts.
A couple of positive portions of the heathcare reform legislation is that it bans dropping coverage and not covering preexisting conditions. That is great and I do not problem with that.
The public option idea is another story. From what I understand having insurance will be mandatory either through your employer, directly though insurance providers, exchanges or the public option. If the company does not offer insurance it will have to pay a tax. I believe the government is naive to not to think that companies will choose to pay the tax instead of offering insurance to their employees. I believe it would be cheaper for many companies to go this route. That would leave the the government's public option a bloated government program that will be unprepared for the amount of people it will need to cover.
How will the government pay for this. Right now the plan is to tax the rich and large businesses. When the government realizes that the rich's taxes alone will not be enough to pay for the amount of people that will belong to the public option, they will come after the middle class. It may not be payroll taxes at first but eventually the average middle class person like you and me will get hammered. I pay enough in taxes, I don't want 30%-40% of my pay to go to the government.
The government needs to figure out another way to go before it's too late for all of us.
