We Already Pay for the Uninsured

Whether we realize it or not, we already pay for the uninsured. Because hospitals are required by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act to provide emergency services, those of us that are insured pay for this through higher hospital bills, higher insurance premiums, and higher taxes.

Hospitals and pharmaceutical and biomed companies operate for profit. They are not in the business keeping us alive if we can't pay for it.

A basic tenet of of Christianity has always been care for those less fortunate. I don't know of any other belief system that could produce a Mother Teresa. I am amazed how so many people who claim Christ as Savior will not consent to even modest systematic care for the indigent and poor.

It's not a matter of if we pay, but how. We may as well take the choice out of the hands of the medical profiteers and put it in the hands of legislators, who, at least in principle, are there because we hired them to make decisions in the interest of everyone's welfare.

A recent segue by Paul Gigot on a segment of The Journal Editorial Report said something to the effect of "Obamacare is upheld by the Supreme Court. What's it mean for the bottom line?"

How about Fox (and CNN and MSNBC and the rest of you who've been calculating the financial impact of nationalized healthcare) take your cameras into the retirement centers that house the uninsured, the hospitals where they are dying, and the cemeteries where they are buried, and then tell us again about the bottom line.

Every Sunday.

Show what happens when a preventable health issue becomes an emergency. Show what happens when an emergency is stabilized but not cured.

Who pays for it? We all do. And not just with our pocketbooks. With each death we relinquish a bit of what makes us human.

Started: 2012-06-30