Quote:
Originally Posted by IsiliRunite
I would address people's specific examples if they weren't addressed by some of my beliefs a few miles upstream of their example.
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Not really you haven't. For example, here's one I posed in my previous post that points out a huge flaw in your thinking, and which I would still love to have you address. I'll pose it here again, in a clearer way.
You've deemed exercise through many sports to be "risky", and therefore unworthy of being covered by insurance. A quick search for sports injury statistics in the U.S. tells us that in 1998 (it was the first year that popped up -
http://www.nyssf.org/statistics1998.html), there were around 22,665 injuries due to tennis, 49,331 injuries due to swimming, 180,582 injuries due to baseball, and 577,621 injuries due to bike riding. Another quick search says that on average, there are 3,000,000 injuries due to auto accidents every year, 2,000,000 of which are permanent injuries. So this would indicate to me that driving a car is a more "risky" activity than any of these sports. Should car accident victims be covered considering the known risks they're taking in getting behind the wheel?
And digging deeper into the sports related injury statistics, you'll see that in '98, there were 60,039 injuries due to weight lifting, 33,320 injuries to people exercising using "exercise equipment", and 123,177 injuries to people exercising using no exercise equipment. That's more injuries collectively at the gym than there were injuries due to presumably "risky" sports like the 81,787 injuries to snow skiers, or the 169,734 injuries to soccer players, so does that mean that gym-related injuries shouldn't be covered either?
And the overall question here is how would you have people get exercise? Clearly,
not exercising would result in worse health for most people, but by your logic, most great forms of exercise would leave people financially screwed if they happened to get hurt while doing them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by IsiliRunite
Keep painting the picture that I am the bad guy by putting removing a little faith in government and putting it back in people to solve, what you and I both acknowledge, are problems. I've said all I can say...
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No one's painting a picture of you being a bad guy, but
you're certainly not making
yourself look good. And I'm on board with personal responsibility and smaller government when possible, but your personal theories on who should and shouldn't be privy to health insurance coverage are so thoughtless as to be stunning. There are blatant contradictions that you refuse to acknowledge or explain - e.g. people who get exercise through sports and other "risky" physical activities shouldn't be covered, and yet I assume you think that people who get no exercise at all also shouldn't be covered because not exercising would be "stupid"
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And as was pointed out by Sarcasmo and Cacophony, the government department devoted to what are and aren't acceptably "safe" activities would have to be massive to keep up with every possible injury scenario that could arise. Or, if it was a private department in a health care company that was determining this stuff, the likeliest outcome would be prices of insurance coverage skyrocketing well higher than they already are just to cover the cost of the work involved in figuring this all out.
And then there would be the deluge of new lawsuits that would constantly be brought against insurance companies because so many injuries or illnesses would be the result of situations that wouldn't fit cleanly into the pre-established list of possible scenarios outlined in the insurance guidelines. And every time the insurance company loses a suit brought against them - which would probably be quite often if they adopted your self-contradictory logic - then guess what? Insurance costs for the rest of us would shoot up yet again. And let's not forget the fact that our courts are already stretched thin these days, so the toll it would take there would be notable as well.
And finally, with the mountains of new red tape your ideas would create, it's easy to imagine that huge numbers of people would be getting sicker, or even dying while they waited to find out if their insurance provider would cover their problem or not. This means that one, if they were more sick by the time they got the green light to be treated, the treatment would probably take longer and cost more, raising our insurance rates yet again, two, your ideas would be responsible for unnecessary deaths, and three, there would be even more lawsuits concerning wrongful death cases.
So in addition to the question you haven't answered that I re-posed to you in the first half of this post, I have this one: when you consider these realistic, potential consequences of your ideas - significantly higher insurance premiums, sicker people, unnecessary deaths, a bogged down court system - what exactly do you think the benefits would be?