So, if I'm understanding, you are requiring businesses to provide health insurance for their employees and charging a penalty if they don't.
I'll be honest, one of the scariest things I see in what the government is talking about is disallowing insurance companies to "discriminate" based on pre-existing conditions. I'm all for that in situations where continuing coverage is demonstrated, but beyond that, the problem exists of people who won't pay for insurance until they need it...and if insurance companies are not allowed to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions, premiums will necessarily be through the roof to account for those people.
One of the "solutions" that government has proposed is sort of what you are talking about where you require everyone to have health insurance or pay a penalty for not having it.
Honestly, I'm undecided on that, but I'm leery of anything where people are forced to do something. If someone wants to "roll the dice" and not have health insurance, I say let them, but if they do end up in a situation where they need coverage, I guess they will simply need to pay for it out of pocket.
I know there is an argument that people who don't have insurance avoid going to the doctor until things get so bad that they need more coverage. I had a co-worker who ended up with bronchial pnemonia and needed surgery because he was technically a contractor without benefits. That's unfortunate.
I think part of the problem we have as a society is that we've gotten used to insurance being supplied by employers. Having been self-employed for a time, I can say that there is a huge difference between group rates and individual rates and that seems wrong to me. But beyond that, people aren't used to having to shop for insurance personally, so the insurance companies end up getting away with things that most consumers wouldn't put up with of any other industry.
Case in point - when my forth child was born, we were told we could spend an extra night in the hospital, but we didn't need to. The booklet of benefits listed a co-pay for "maternity coverage" per night. Elsewhere in the booklet was a "hospital stay", but since this was maternity coverage, we weren't worried about it and we decided to stay the extra night.
When we were billed, they billed us twice as much as we were expecting because they claimed the nightly rate for both mother and child. Personally, I would have thought "maternity coverage" assumed a child.
We pointed this out to the insurance company, who informed us that the booklet of benefits was handled by a third-party company. We called the third party and they said that they had nothing to do with what coverage was actually offered. The insurance company said that my company controlled what was actually covered and what wasn't, so I needed to talk to HR. HR said that based on what was written, we were correct, but there was nothing they could do about it. Back to the insurance company, they said that HR could decide to cover it however they wanted, but it became clear that if they wanted it to be interpreted the way it was written, that the premiums would be increased accordingly.
In short, not accountability and 3 different companies involved, all able to point the finger somewhere else. We wouldn't put up with that if we were purchasing a car, for example, but because the consumer isn't the one making the purchase, the system becomes bloated with too many middle-men.
I guess my big problem with the health-care reform, though, is that while there are certain things they are wanting to do to actually address the problems, there are far more things they are trying to do that just redistributes where the problems occur. I think reform would be great (I'm not sure I would go so far as to say necessary), but I don't like much of how they are going about it.
