Quote:
Originally Posted by desertgrandma
It seems that we in the US soon won't have a choice. Right now, you can choose to have insurance, or not. Here's an interesting article I read last night.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articl...hcare0702.html
Just like car insurance, health insurance will soon be "mandatory". |
Interesting article. Thanks.
In the UK, the NHS started (together with some other things) being funded by "National Insurance" contributions (NI) which an individual pays at something like 10% of income, and the employer adds to that (slightly more 12%?). Apologies if these figures are wrong -- I'm sure Google will correct me! If memory serves, they were a lot lower when the NHS started.
Practically today, the NI contributions just go into a big pot that, once the bankers have removed their bonuses and guaranteed pensions, is then used to pay for the NHS and everything else the government pays for (no, it doesn't do everything it *pays* people to do it).
So it is possible to argue that we in the UK have compulsorary insurance, however it doesn't suffer from companies trying to save money by excluding people or charging more to some. Whether that is good or bad is the subject for a completely different debate that will get so heated I don't want to have anything to do with it.
(If you're interested in the history of the NHS, probably the
Beveridge Report is as good a place to start as any.)
However, I'm not happy with the car insurance analogy. I only need car insurance if I am going to drive. Health insurance, it can be argued, is needed if I intent to live... Next the reason car insurance is mandatory, at least in the UK, is the direct impact (pun unintended) that a driver can have on others.