With the tremendously important debate currently taking place regarding the perceived need for healthcare reform and the government’s alleged responsibility to provide coverage for every person in this country – which your Mandarin can guarantee will include those in the country illegally through a blanket amnesty program, but that is another topic for another time – I began to wonder how much does health insurance actually cost.

So I spent some time today on the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois web site today to do some research. There were 9 different plans to choose from that ranged from all encompassing to hospitalization only. For purposes of this research I focused on two plans:

• Blue Choice Select:
o $5,000,000.00 Lifetime Benefit
o $30.00 Office Visit Co-pay
o Drug Card with $10.00 Co-pay for Generics
o $6,000.00 (Family of 4*)/$3,000 (Individual**) Out of Pocket Limit
o $756.02 (Family of 4*)/$233.29 (Individual**) Monthly Premium

• Basic Blue:
o $5,000,000.00 Lifetime Benefit
o $3,000.00 (Family of 4*)/$1,000.00 (Individual**) Out of Pocket Limit
o $558.10 (Family of 4*)/$172.21 (Individual**) Monthly Premium

So doing some basic math and making some assumptions, I choose to tackle the 47,000,000 uninsured people out there. Let’s assume that of that number, 15,000,000 are illegal immigrants and should be excluded, another 10,000,000 are children that could be covered under existing programs such as SCHIP, but their parents are too lazy to fill out the paper work, and another 10,000,000 are those 18 to 35 year olds that think they are indestructible and don’t need insurance. Having subtracted those 35,000,000 people from the equation we are left with 12,000,000 people that do not have access to health insurance either due to affordability, unemployment, or the transitioning from one job to another. Once again I feel the need to state that while they may not have health insurance, they are not excluded from receiving emergency healthcare.

Now if we take 12,000,000 and multiply that by the monthly cost of the Blue Choice Select individual monthly premium you get a cost of $2.8 Billion per month or $33.6 Billion per year. If you take that same number and multiply it by the monthly cost of the Basic Blue individual monthly premium you get a cost of $2.1 Billion per month or $24.8 Billion per year.

Those are some large numbers that you as a productive citizen and tax payer would get to subsidize. Is healthcare a right, or is it a valuable service that one should be willing to pay for? I personally feel that it is not a right but an individual responsibility. The government does not pay the grocery bills for every person in this country, but they do provide programs such as food-stamps, school meal programs, etc., for those people that cannot – or unfortunately in some cases choose not to – make it on their own. I would rather the government address the health insurance crisis by instituting tort reform and providing tax breaks and incentives to cover what individuals and companies spend on insurance coverage rather than taking control of the system and outlaying trillions of dollars of tax payer money that the country does not have.

Would I like to see a country where everyone had insurance to cover the costs their health care needs, the answer would be yes. Do I think this is a realistic goal, the answer would be no. The hard cold truth of the matter is that there are always going to be those individuals that fall outside of the for lack of a better word “comfort zone” whether that be due to poor life choices, catastrophe (either man-made or natural disaster), or other factors beyond their control. It is a sad time for this country when we automatically look to the government to solve these problems instead of our families, churches, neighbors, and the community at large. Have we become such an isolated culture focused only on what our Facebook pages contain or how many people follow our Twitter accounts that we have forgotten about what it really means to be a community that looks out for our fellow citizens.

*Family of 4 consists of a male 40-year old non-smoker, a female 40-year old non-smoker, a male 7-year old, and a female 4-year old.
**Individual consists of a male 40-year old non-smoker

The Mandarin

The Mandarin, whose real name is 吏恆, joined the order in 1309, and introduced the Gormogons into England during the 18th Century.

The Mandarin enjoys spending time with his pet manticore, Βάρἰκος, or Barry (who can be found in the Bestiary). When not in the Castle…well, frankly, nobody is quite sure where he goes.

The Mandarin popularized the fine art of “gut booting,” by which he delivers a powerful kick to the stomach of anyone that annoys him. Although nearly universal today, the act of gut booting or threatening someone or something with a gut boot is solely due to him.