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Originally Posted by Nascar1966
Since you think its okay for a healthy American to pay more for thier health insurance so you dont have to pay alot, can you help me with paying for college for my son?
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He did help pay for your kid's education- it's called public education and you get it through grade 12. It's the reason the US has a very high literacy rate. One of the things I find ridiculous is areas where elderly people who are exempted from school taxes because they don't have kids. Listen, you old fraks, I'm paying for your Social Security; the least you can do is pay for the kid down the street's damn grade school education so hopefully he can grow up to be someone who can hold a decent job and not be a punk who is going to mug me decades later on the way to the bank to deposit my Social Security check.
The reason young healthy people should be paying into a health system is because what drives insurance costs down for everyone is having a mix of both healthy and sick people in a policy. It's the reason insurance is cheaper for large companies and impossibly expensive for small ones- large companies have a larger pool of applicants, many of whom won't need much in the way of health care because they're healthier than others. Insurance companies assume that people buying individual care are only doing so because they are sick and charge them accordingly. Without healthy people in a health care system, prices continue to go up. It's why Europeans pay less for health care and get more from it than we do (yes, they do. Sorry guys. FOX is lying to you). Since everyone is paying into the system, via taxes, the risk is spread out and average costs drop.
Insurance depends on a lot of people who aren't going to need to collect on it paying into a system on the off chance they might need it. People trying to buy individual policies are not being permitted into the system.
Not to mention, people without insurance have no bargaining power, and hospitals charge them anywhere from 100 to 400 percent more than they charge insured people- to make up for people who can't pay for their hospital bills. So they people who can't afford insurance are getting charged more for the same service than the people who have it, because the insurance companies have negotiated steep discounts for services.
This is a very simplistic explanation, I know, but the misinformation about health care is pretty astounding.