Uni Health Care

[Eilonnwy]

What you pay for COBRA goes by what it cost you to have that same insurance plan with your employer. You pay what you were paying before and sometimes a little more. I answered your question. People who just find themselves out of a job get unemployment insurance and depending on how long they worked and how much they made depends on how long they can be on it. Sometimes people can even live off of their unemployment check enough to pay bills and buy food until they find another job. Unemployment is great because it's not a handout. The employer pays unemployment insurance by law so that if their employees are laid off or fired they have something to fall back on.

My good friend just got fired from her job. She works through a temp agency based in Boston so she has to have Health Insurance and they can't discriminate against her pre-conditions. This past Friday she just got fired from her job because they wanted her to switch to a CA based Temp agency and essentially lose her health care. My friend has a lot of health problems, diabetes being one of them. She cannot go without health insurance. She only just got off Cobra and can't afford to go back on because with her problems it's ridiculously expensive. Cobra is a piece of shit, and there are serious issues with our current healthcare when someone can lose their job because the employer wants to avoid paying for insurance.

I NEVER said I didn't want my money to pay for education. I want people to be educated because education = a good job and people who have a good career are usually able to afford a private health care plan and are able to help support the economy. There is no societal benefit from giving people something as expensive as a health insurance plan for free. Health care costs too much for the American taxpayers to provide for everyone. We are in a recession...we have an extreme amount of people not paying taxes. We can not afford to do this! Back when our economy was up and everyone had a job and was making money then maybe something like this could have worked. Then again most of what we Americans thought was prosperity was just really cloaked by people living above their means and putting it on their credit cards. When people realized that they had a hundred thousand dollars of credit card debt...then the economy started failing. Once you default on a car loan and three or four credit cards you can't get any more credit. When the American people stopped being able to get a credit card then they stopped buying things...then people lost jobs....and you see where we are today. We don't have the economy we once had and we can't start a program that costs billions at a time like this. It would be great to just give health care to any and everyone...it's not possible right now. If we want the American economy to just commit suicide then by all means go right ahead and line everyone up for free healthcare and free cancer care and lets see how long it takes us to go completely broke.

I think it's disgusting that people argue the health of it's people "costs too much" for us to undertake. Would you say that if your own health depended on a public option? But whatever, you want to go the money route so here we go. What you don't realize is that we are already paying for the uninsured, and it's expensive. Every time someone uninsured gets to sick they go to an ER, they cannot be refused care, and then they don't pay the bill. Guess who eats the cost of that visits? I'll give you a hint, it's not the doctor or the hospital. Paying for health insurance for everyone is substantially better than our current system since we can pay for preventive care and treat a problem before it becomes to big and requires an ER visit, which are super expensive.

Putting forth a public a public option will not only save money in respects to unpaid ER visits, but for people with health insurance. It creates competition that forces other health insurance companies to lower their price.

And let's not forget, if you have health insurance now, you're not all set. Get cancer, and see what happens. The number 1 cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt, and that's for people with health insurance. When you get a serious illness in this country, your health insurance drops you or won't pay for the really expensive procedures. I'm listening to Keith Olbermann and I just heard a woman crying in a Town Hall talking about her Husband, he has brain damage from an accident and her health insurance won't pay for him to eat and drink. You call that health insurance?

So this healthcare debate is not just about a public option, but to make sure Insurance Companies won't be making billions and billions of dollars at our expense.