Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

More Details & Their Implications, Pt.10 –  The comprehensive summary.

Previous…

‘Free riders’ is a favorite term of Mitt. Romney, co-creator of the program while Governor of Massachusetts at the time. Free riders are the significant number of uninsured who show up in ERs for every kind of medical care, for lack of any other avenue. The cost of this kind of care results in billions of dollars lost, but still has to be picked up by someone. It’s been shown to be picked up by ‘the rest of us consumers’, by the government and, even ‘eaten’ by the budgets of benevolent hospitals who still provide that care. The beauty of the Massachusetts’ plan is that all residents are required to buy health insurance. Both the abusers and the truly needy that appropriate the ER for lack of health insurance are given appropriate justice. Those who abuse the system for a ‘free ride’ are forced to pay for health insurance. The other group who would pay for health insurance but can’t, because of cost or denial, is given the opportunity to buy it. Budda-Boom, problem solved. Now the unfair burden that was placed on ‘the rest of us consumers’, by the government and those benevolent hospitals goes away.

In the end, however, other states are far from being united and it seems like, at least half of them are floundering. Politics, as usual, seem to be the first agenda, with health insurance not in the spotlight, especially in many Republican states who don’t deem health care to be an important issue. As a result, most other states have been reluctant to duplicate the effort of Massachusetts.

According to a study by CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the Southwest region of the US is the worst-off region in our nation for lack of health insurance, with Oklahoma leading the way for being the worst. The study shows “more than 33% of the people in Oklahoma are uninsured.” The best, as mentioned earlier, is the Northeast. Massachusetts is tied with Hawaii as the best, having the “lowest percentage of uninsured residents at 9.5%,” shown by the CDC’s findings.