Mandatory coverage moves to forefront of health-care debate

[Elmore Furth]

Mandatory payments for healthcare under the Obama plan is one of the most contentious parts of the healthcare bill. It is one of the most unpopular parts of the Massachussets healthcare plan whis is similar.

The crux of the problem is this:

1. People want the right to spend their money however they would like and according to the objectors of the mandatory healthcare payments plan, this is unconstitutional.
2. The Right to Healthcare is now in the popular lexicon if not in legal form yet.

So when you are feeling good, you don't want to pay for health insurance. When you are sick, you demand the best healthcare, the system has to offer.

If mandatory healthcare insurance payments are not mandated, hospitals will close. Then people will discover that their 'Right to Healthcare' is meaningless . If you are dying and your family has to drive 500 miles to find a hospital to take care of you, you are going to die.

Redundancy in the heathcare system means that excess hospital beds are available in case of an epidemic, natural disaster or some other healthcare emergency. If you want to spend the least amount of money when you are healthy, you might not survive when you are sick.

With a court ruling in Virginia this week that the government cannot require Americans to buy health insurance, President Obama has landed in the position of defender-in-chief of an idea he once opposed.

As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama insisted that the health-care reform plans of his rivals were misguided, because they envisioned forcing Americans to buy health insurance or risk a fine. Over and over, he said on the campaign trail that such a mandate was unnecessary.

"My belief is - is that if we make affordable, if we provide subsidies to those who can't afford it, they will buy it," Obama put it during a January 2008 debate in Los Angeles against fellow candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who favored a mandate.

Nearly three years later, the insurance requirement - part of the scaffolding of the health-care legislation that Congress enacted in March - has emerged as the law's central villain.





Mandatory coverage moves to forefront of health-care debate

[bluestateguy]

1. I have a question

In every job I have ever had, I was required to either have the employee health plan provided by my employer OR prove that I was being covered by a spouse's plan ( I am single so it it a moot issue).

I know this is not the government we are talking about here, but doesn't a mandate sort of already exist for a lot of people in the employer based system?