As a small business owner, it’s time to weigh-in on the obscene cost of health care. But, if you please, the culprits aren’t the doctors, hospitals and other medical services. Once again, WE THE PEOPLE willingly have been sucked into mindless attitudes and misplaced priorities. Health Insurance as currently practiced is a bad idea that blows the cost of health care out the roof. Try on this premise: We should adopt health insurance only for catastrophic health care. For everything else, people should simply pay the bill as they would for any other purchase they make in life. You get a checkup, pay the bill. You get the flu, pay the bill. Break a leg, pay the bill. The pervading sickness across this land is the notion that health isn’t a cost of living like taking a vacation. Health isn’t as important as gorging, puffing, guzzling, scarfing Cialis or babbling on the cell, not to mention the mindless addiction to flat screen mania. Hell, getting sick isn’t fair. Some of us get sick more than others. So we need our friends and neighbors to pay for our health and we help pay for theirs. Isn’t that a sweet socialistic concept? Instead of looking our doctors or hospitals in the eye as we pay for their services, we send money to insurance companies who recycle the money to pay for thousands of paper pushers inhabiting a corporate monstrosity. So what do you think happens? Yes, you’re almost as smart as a fifth grader. The cost goes up and up and up. Health insurance makes sense for dread, degenerative and life-threatening disease. For everything else, we should pay direct. The cost should be much lower without the burden of regulation, litigation and overhead. Physicians would have relationships with customers and charge for services as they see fit. And, yes, this idea means people would be forced to be more accountable and responsible for their health. Horrors. They might have to think twice before charging the $2000 cruise to a credit card when they need a colonoscopy. That is, if the colonoscopy is more important than a week at Cozumel. Hmmmmmnn.
