Coming Soon

Apologies for the lack of posting all day. I’ve been crafting a really long post in my other blog. Just finished, and hopefully it should import soon. I’d love any feedback, for I spent a lot of time on it. Check it out here if you’d rather not wait for it to import.

Updated: A taste:

2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs

Americans with pre-existing conditions need subsidies under any plan, but community rating is a dubious way to bring fairness to health care. The reason is twofold: First, it forces young people, who typically have lower incomes than older workers, to pay far more than their actual cost, and gives older workers, who can afford to pay more, a big discount. The state laws gouging the young are a major reason so many of them have joined the ranks of uninsured.

This is in some fashions, I suppose, a loss of freedom. But I think the issue is complicated when one takes a long-term and wholistic perspective. People age; the young become old. As such, as per the above argument, the young will then get to the point where their insurance rates become the lower, more subsidized ones. It is far from irrational for a society to decide that the most efficient way to provide health insurance to all its citizens is to place more of the cost on the young than the old, considering that the economic circumstances that the young enter into our the result of the efforts of past generations, that is, the elderly that their higher rates subsidize.

If society tends to force the elderly to retire and lose their income to the young who enter into the ranks of the employed, then there must be a mechanism by which the elderly are compensated by the system and supported, in return for their previous input for society. That is not to say that this system will be perfect, considering we are restricted from considering a single-payer system, which would open up better possibilities for dealing with this issue. But this so-called loss of freedom must be viewed through the perspective that we necessarily give up certain freedoms to secure greater goods and efficiencies within the social contract. This is perhaps one of those instances. So, in strict terms, yes, this would be a loss of freedom, but it is a voluntary loss, decided upon through the mechanisms of democratic republicanism, violating no inviolable rights. Only strict libertarians can object to such a point, and a majority of the American public has not embraced such a political philosophy.