Lifestyles and health insurance

A lot of us are pretty tired of about hearing health care, and before I delve into the topic of the day, I do want to touch on one aspect of the corporate media’s treatment of the Obama plan (that is going nowhere at this point). People were talking about the cost for a family making $80,000 a year, and that was quite telling. But just about everyone who isn’t already on Medicaid was going to have to pay something. I have always known that I have the right to buy health insurance. This “plan” was simply a government mandate forcing the citizenry to purchase a product from private corporations. And, for the record, Obama campaigned as being different from Hillary because his plan would not require anyone to buy the insurance.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I want to talk about groceries. I don’t have health insurance, because I am self employed and I can’t afford it. This is because the cost of health care is impacted by how much insurance companies have to pay out. I have incurred zero dollars in health care expenses over the last 25 years of my life, and I live a healthy lifestyle because I want to feel good, and I don’t want to be sick. So I would think that since I have no history of sickness, I am in good health, and don’t engage in risky, unhealthy behavior, insurance should be inexpensive to me.

The problem is that I have to pay for the bad habits of others if I want to buy health insurance, and that makes it out of my price range. There was a woman in front of me at the grocery store yesterday buying $200 worth of the most unhealthy foods known to man; huge tubs of ice cream, syrup, donuts, cakes, cookies, huge slabs of ribs, hot dogs, baloney, candy, you name it. And she weighed about 300 pounds.

I am not judging her as a human being. I’m just saying that when you have a health care system that doesn’t consider the lifestyles of the participants in group plans, those who are intelligent and disciplined enough to eschew unhealthy behavior pay for those who aren’t. This is an aspect of the “debate” that is never discussed, but if I want insurance, I have to pay into a pool that contains smokers and people who are inviting diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease through obesity, poor diets, and sedentary lifestyles.

The bottom line is, people like me can’t afford insurance because the companies have to pay out so much money due to illnesses that are the result of bad personal lifestyle choices.