Wrong Analogy

I've waited a couple of weeks to post this. One I wanted to cool down and two I wanted to think over what I'm saying.

Chris Rock made a surprise appearance on Bill Maher a couple of weeks ago. The topic was health care. He made the analogy that health care reform is like people who've paid for first class on an airplane being upset when others who haven't get upgraded.

This analogy is totally wrong when it comes to health care because the true analogy is that the taxpayers are the ones paying for those in first class and paying to sit in coach and half way through the flight getting shoved out without a parachute.

Medicare and Medicaid are both paid for by tax payers. To qualify for the first you have to be over 65 years of age. To qualify for the second you have to be poor.

The working class pays for this medical care and have to pay for private insurance through their employers or go without. Those self-employed that try to get insurance find it exorbitant in the extreme.

Personal example:

We have a good health plan, not through the schools, but through my wife's employer. My daughter spent an hour in an emergency room, had an ultrasound and a unit of blood, then transferred to the hospital had minor surgery and a two day stay. The health plan payed the bulk of the costs, but what was left over swamped us financially and forced me to retire early and declare bankruptcy.

Contrast that with my mother who was in the emergency room for a day, six days in the hospital and ten days of rehabilitation. With Medicare, payed for by taxpayers and a supplemental plan that is a considerable cost to her, she has only the ambulance bill to fight over. I do not begrudge the medicare plan that helps my mother. Financially it was a life saver for her and without it she would have died. I do not begrudge the medicaid that helps my son and his two children.

Still the working class shouldn't have to pay for everyone else's health care and then be denied the care they need or get wiped out financially. There needs to be a level playing field here. Medicare for all or a single payer system is the only fair system, and it is the kind of health care that almost all the other industrialized countries in the world have and in those countries the number of bankruptcies due to health costs are zero. In the U.S. I've become one of the 150,000 families forced into this situation.

On a side note: Thanks George W. for changing the bankruptcy laws that have forced me to retire and lower my income so I can declare bankruptcy. The gift that keeps on giving.