Listen to this:
“The idea of Obamacare is … that the people who are healthy
pay for the people who are sick. It’s not working, and that’s why it’s in a
death spiral.”
“We're not going to make an American do what they don't want
to do. You get (health insurance) if you want it.”
* * *
The idea that Republican leaders in Congress and the Trump
administration have such a flawed understanding of the insurance industry –
while they’re in the process of rewriting insurance regulations – would be a
really funny joke if it wasn’t so pathetic and sad.
Or is it?
The two quotes at the top are attributable to Paul Ryan, speaker
of the House of Representatives. Paul Ryan is supposed to be the “Republican brain” while I’m just a humble
blogger with a small college bachelor’s degree and a basic understanding of the
world, but even I know how stupid these comments sound, at least on their face.
First, Mr. Ryan, a question: How do you think insurance
works? Car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, homeowner’s…it’s all
the same. I’ve been paying car insurance all my adult life but have used it so rarely
that I can’t even remember the last time. So where do my monthly premiums go?
To pay claims from people who do have accidents. That’s how car insurance
works.
In addition, Paul, I am required by the government to have car insurance or I can’t drive my car.
I pay a lot of money for homeowner’s insurance, too, but the
only claims I ever made were denied. The money I shell out in premiums every
month is paying other people’s claims, because that’s how homeowner’s insurance
works.
And yes, Paul, people are required to have homeowner’s insurance
to get a mortgage.
Health insurance works the same way. A lot of people, including those who are
in reasonably good health, helped to pay for my wife’s $123,000 back surgery a
couple of years ago. Premiums we paid when we were younger helped to cover someone
else’s cancer treatments, and so on.
Breaking news, Paul: The government does tell us we have to
have insurance for a lot of things, and in all cases, the many help to pay the
bills for the few. You might know that if you didn’t get your salary, your
perks and all of your benefits provided by… wait for it … the government.
So Paul Ryan is just really stupid, right? Well, not so
fast.
Ryan is a devotee of the Ayn Rand School of Selfishness and
a believer in the flawed concept of trickle-down economics. He believes that the economy is powered by America’s wealthiest one percent, and that giving tax cuts to the wealthy (and to corporations) will create jobs. The
money transferred to the wealthiest Americans will then, theoretically, trickle
down to the middle class.
So, far from being too stupid to understand insurance, Ryan
is apparently smart enough to make it pay off bigly for the wealthy in America
at the expense of the nation’s sick and the poor. The problem is that trickle-down
economics has never worked – has never trickled anywhere, in fact – because of
one simple fact: When you give free money to the wealthiest Americans, they usually
just keep it.
Sometime today or tomorrow, the Congressional Budget Office
is going to tell us what “Ryancare” will actually cost the citizens of the
United States of America. I can tell you what it will cost one of us. A
63-year-old woman with pre-existing conditions is currently paying
$735 a month to a health insurance provider and receiving a $660 subsidy from
the government, making her actual monthly premium $1,395 and her annual cost a
ridiculous $16,740.
Her annual subsidy is a couple dollars short of $8,000, so take
that away and replace it with a $4,000 tax credit that Ryan proposes and two
things happen: (1) she has to dig into the family budget and find at least $660
more a month just to keep her same insurance and (2) losing the subsidy will
cost her $4,000 more a year right off the top.
And all of that assumes that her premiums remain the same –
highly unlikely considering that even before Obamacare when she had group
insurance through an employer, her premiums went up a little bit every year.
When Tom Price, our new Secretary of Health and Human Services, stated
over the weekend that “nobody will be worse off financially” under the health
insurance program the Republicans are proposing, Breitbart News called that
statement “the lie of the year.”
In conclusion, I could agree with Paul Ryan that the government shouldn't require me to carry insurance, but that would be really bad news for State Farm when I stop sending in my premiums every month. I mean, that is what you had in mind, isn't it Paul?
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