Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Why Pick On The Little Guy?

This news story has been making the rounds.  It points out some of the flaws in Massachusetts health care reform that was put in place a few years ago while Mitt Romney was governor.  Many of the problems currently being experienced in the Bay State will also be problems under the health care "reform" law that Mr. Obama signed recently.  There are more than a few tidbits worth reading.

What has my dander up is this:
When state lawmakers overhauled the health care system in 2006, they combined into a single insurance pool consumers who buy coverage on their own with those who get insurance through their jobs at small businesses that employ 50 or fewer people. The aim was to make insurance more affordable for the individuals buying coverage on their own, who tended to be sicker and therefore had been paying very high premiums. And the hope was that having small businesses and their workers absorb some of the cost of covering this group would raise their premiums only modestly.

So they stuck small business owners with the problem.  Not big businesses with huge insurance pools like General Electric, a major employer in Massachusetts.  Not the state government with its huge pool of employees and retirees.  They screwed small business owners.

Small businesses are the backbone of the US economy.  Larger businesses are fine.  They certainly add quite a bit to the economy as well, but small businesses provide the largest pool of jobs to those of us that need them.

And the politicians decided to screw them over by dumping the irregularly insured into their insurance pool.

The number four reason not to trust politicians is because they haven't figured out that you shouldn't piss in the river upstream from where you get your drinking water.  This is just the latest illustration of that fact.

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