Thoughts on Healthcare

Posted by: on Feb 2, 2011 | One Comment

When it comes to hot button political issues, I try to bring a common sense approach to things or just ignore them completely. Quite honestly, I’m not a professional politician, don’t want to be one and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express which their TV ads would make you think might qualify me to be one…but I digress.

Anyway, here’s what I know about health care.  For a policy that has 3 people on it, it costs my business (that’s www.MonComInc.com if you didn’t know) close to $20,000 a year for health insurance. If I stayed with my previous provider that I had been with for 7 or 8 years for 2011, they wanted to raise my premium by close to 25% and that number would have been closer to $30,000. You want to know what’s choking small business growth in America, you don’t have to look much further than health insurance costs to see that this is definitely one of the issues. It’s a constant topic of conversation among my small business colleagues.

So, Congress enacts some bill which causes all kinds of controversy and some judge in Florida says the bill is unconstitutional.  Does that help the situation out? I don’t know.  What I do know is that the elected officials who made the law and the federal judge who shot down the law have really good health insurance. In all probability, the best health insurance our tax dollars can buy them. I don’t hear any of them complaining about their co-pay, deductible, dealing with HMOs, the increase in their premiums and everything else I hear my friends, clients and business colleagues dealing with every day.

So what does my common sense philosophy tell me? It tells me that all Americans should have the right to the same health care our elected and appointed federal employees have, which I seriously doubt they pay one penny for, at the same cost they pay. Or, better yet, these elected officials should be forced to have an HMO plan (not the premiere plan they have now), where they have to get a referral for every little ache and pain, can’t see the doctor they really want to see without paying a huge out of network fee, pay $25 or more for prescriptions (which we underwrite by the way), and lots of other stuff. It’s not a left or right issue, it’s a common sense issue. If our tax dollars go to pay for career politicians and career federal employees to get the best health insurance and a shit load of other perqs, don’t we the taxpayers have the same rights? It’s not like these guys are doing a great job. Sure they say they feel our pain but our pain comes with a co-pay and their pain, well we pay for that.

1 Comment

  1. Mike Makurat
    February 11, 2011

    Ira – the pols don’t feel our pain. Movie reference…they don’t know what pain is! Unfortunately, most pols today are very wealthy, which immediately disconnects them from many of us. If their wealth served to make them more objective, less susceptible to lobbying and other influence peddlers, I wouldn’t mind. Instead, they seem to subscribe to the adage “the rich get richer” and leave us grovelling in the dust. Being unemployed, or broke or unable to get insurance is an abstract concept to most of them. I hope this Tea Party thing is changing that, with more citizen legislators and candidates with more grassroots and less bluegrass.