National health care plan full of flaws

I've been following the whole debate over nationalized health care for many months. I have listened to all of it with an open mind, but something really caught my attention the other day. Someone said that they have to penalize people to encourage them to be in the proposed system. They need young people who don't go to the doctor to pay into the system to keep it solvent. When those young people get older, they will need still more young people who don't use medical services but pay for health coverage to subsidize their predecessors. This sounds dangerously close to a Ponzi scheme doesn't it? It is not being designed to be self supporting - and like all Ponzi schemes will eventually collapse.

One of the other things that bothers me about this proposed system is that the penalty (fee) for not having insurance seems to only make a difference for those making over $192,000 a year. As an example my employer pays a portion of my insurance and I pay a portion. Presently for family coverage my share costs me $4800 a year. If I made $100,000 a year, it would be cheaper for me to pay 2.5 percent of my income as a penalty and just go to the emergency room when I need care. From my employer's perspective, if he pays me less than $125,000 a year, he is better off paying the 8 percent penalty than fighting to provide private insurance. My fear is that this will dawn on many small businesses. This will leave many in the middle class with no choice but the public option. How many young people making $8 to $10 an hour will make this same choice? There goes the pool of money from the young needed to support the older people.

The thing I can't understand is why they just don't expand Medicare to cover those 4 to 12 million uninsured people. Perhaps because the government would have to admit that fraud is so rampant that they can't control it? So they want to invent a whole new system. We'll have three medical systems: Medicaid, Medicare and nationalized health care.

What is needed is to tweak the current system, not dismantle it. The thing I'm most offended by in our present system is that I have to pay a $90 a month fee just to be on my spouse's insurance since my employer offers insurance as well. On the other extreme, if I carry two full family policies the insurance companies demand to see EOBs from each other so that they make sure they don't pay too much out of their pockets. In the mean time, they do not cut the cost of my premium to reflect their decreased financial liability. It would be nice if my second insurance premium was proportional to their liability. It would be nice if spouses could be enrolled on one policy with no $90 a month penalty.

In fairness to the insurance companies, they should be able to charge rates based on health and lifestyle choices of their clients. If someone smokes two packs a day, are 5 feet tall and weigh 350 pounds, they should pay a lot for your health insurance. Inevitably, their insurance would be so expensive they couldn't afford it. If hospitals could refuse service to people who didn't have insurance those people would have a consequence for their poor choices. Consequences are wonderful motivators. Certainly there are those who have a medical condition or a genetic predisposition for a disease and we need to protect them.

Tort reform would be nice as well. Gross negligence on the part of a doctor is one thing, but it is called "practicing medicine" for a reason.

Why are our politicians so blind to these common-sense ideas? Please, let's tweak our current system of private insurance not establish yet another bureaucracy which will inevitably end up rife with fraud.

WES JOHNSTON
Dalzell