Gorilla's Blog

Once again, the utterly stupid tie between employment and health insurance comes back to haunt the unemployed!!!

Seems that, absent an extension by Congress (good luck with getting 60 votes for that while health care “reform” is still being debated), subsidies will run out that would enable unemployed workers to keep their health benefits for 9 months after losing their jobs.

Once the subsidies go, the cost of insurance skyrockets, to the point that in many states it will exceed the monthly unemployment benefit.

So, more Americans will be without health care, or faced to choose between health care and eating.

It’s for this reason that health care reform as currently proposed is both totally inadequate and totally nonsensical.

Unemployed workers who lose their health care will, once they’re poor enough, be able to apply for Medicaid, meaning the government will be paying for their health care either way. Of course, Medicaid coverage is very minimal, but at least it’s something.

So why not simply bring everyone into Medicare and break the tie once and for all with employment?

Because that would mean the end of richly profitable health insurance companies (although they could be allowed, as they are now with Medicare, to sell very lucrative supplemental policies), reduce health care costs by at least 30%, and give the American people control over their medical-industrial complex.

No chance of that happening anytime soon!

Gorilla thinks: “We’d like to be more compassionate, but stupidity always gets in the way!”