31% Of Americans Without Health Insurance Live In Households Making More Than $50,000/Year
“With $50,000 or more in household income, wouldn’t many or most of those 6.4 million American households be without health insurance voluntarily?” asks Professor Mark Perry talking about new data from the US Census about health insurance in America. “That is, couldn’t many of those households afford some type of low-cost basic health insurance? As one example, you can purchase high-deductible basic health insurance coverage through BlueCross BlueShield of Texas for as low as $80 per month for a 30-year male and for $102 per month for a 30-year female, which is about the same as the monthly cost of a cell phone or cable TV plan.”
The problem is the number of people who consider a cell phone plan, or cable television, more important than health insurance. Here’s the data he’s talking about:
What a lot of people don’t realize is that health insurance isn’t that expensive. Health care is actually a lot cheaper than you’d think sometimes, especially when you realize that most medical care providers will give you a heavy discount if you pay cash (they charge more for dealing with health insurance bureaucracy).
And these things could be even cheaper if the costs weren’t inflated by a myriad of government prohibitions, mandates and regulations.
But the government needed a crisis to justify intervention in the health care/health insurance industries, and the uninsured “crisis” was it.
To a degree, uninsured Americans are a problem, but again that’s driven by policy. There are no consequences for a lack of health insurance. People without health insurance can show up at emergency rooms across the nation and get care, then stiff the hospitals on the bill, all with near impunity. We’ve disconnected actions from consequences, and of course that has created a problem.
We don’t consider it a tragedy when somebody is bankrupted because they drove without car insurance and got into an accident, but for some reason people who don’t buy health insurance (or do some sort of self-insurance) before they’re in need of health care are a tragedy that necessitates expensive government solutions.
Tags: Health Care, health insurance
