Removing barriers for business: Healthcare

Written by VG Reese
On November 18, 2016
Post image for flavor, not content
Categories: Far Center Politics
Tags: Healthcare

As someone who will be starting his own LLC and hopefully earning money working with clients, it’s extremely important to me to keep costs and complications down as a business.

One of the biggest barriers is healthcare. I am enabled to make the decision to start my own business because of my wife’s job. Without it, my daughter and I would lose healthcare and make the situation untenable. I’d have to work for a business that was large enough to bargain for healthcare coverage.

It’s essential to have healthcare. There are many things, such as flu shots, that are very good to have. Those aren’t the reasons to be insured in the modern world though, as the costs for paying out of pocket for a flu shot and blood tests every few years is vastly lower than insurance premiums.

What you should be concerned with financially is cancer, a car accident, or any number of things that can go wrong. Not having health insurance means after exhausting your own financial resources, you end up with one of these three scenarios:

  • You get denied healthcare which means you get sicker until it is an emergency and a doctor is forced to treat you
  • You receive healthcare but own a large amount of money and must declare bankruptcy
  • You die
Not being a fan of any of those options, I couldn't take that risk. In reality, the order that people without health insurance participate in the system looks like this:
  • You get sick and avoid the doctor
  • It becomes an emergency and you are treated by a doctor
  • You cannot pay that doctor and have no health insurance so you get no follow up care
  • Go back to number 2 until you die
This is the most expensive, least efficient, and current system we have as a country. The Affordable Care Act goes a small portion of the way required to fixing that loop, but it doesn't close it completely.
One idea that I am toying with is what happened if we made a law that did the below three things:
  • It is illegal for an employer to provide or negotiate health insurance coverage
  • All people receiving health coverage today will have an amount added to their paychecks, tax free, that equals what their employer was paying for them to have coverage that would be paid to that person until they leave their current job
  • Insurance companies must provide the same coverage that would have been negotiated with the employer to the employee
It gets hazy at step 3, especially as time goes by. I think it gets more complex then step 3 would lead you to believe, but that is an exercise for another time.
I love freedom. You need money to truly be free. You also need healthcare to continue enjoying that freedom. I want to be more free to do what I want and have a system that isn't assuming I make a large amount of money or work for a large employer. As a society, we need to decide if we want people who don't make a lot of money to be seen as less than human and expendable. Because that's how I feel we treat them today.

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