The only way to sensibly, logically and fairly provide health care insurance is for the individual to take responsibility for their own health, and pay for their own health care. Business may elect to offer insurance as a part of a benefits package, but just as wages shouldn’t be established by law, neither should health care.

It’s primarily an issue of responsibility.

When you give someone something for free, they tend to take it for granted – as most Americans take the right to vote or personal freedoms for granted. We know there are pills and procedures to cure every ailment without any effort on our part, so our diets are poor to deplorable, we don’t exercise, we drink and smoke without regards to the consequences and take foolish risks with our personal safety.

We know someone else will take care of us if we don’t take care of ourselves. And the medical profession loves us for it, inventing new diseases to go with the new drugs, procedures and treatments they invent, when they aren’t pushing for more ‘free’ health care insurance.

When health care is ‘free’ people forget to show up for appointments, insist on being treated for things that could be dealt with at home or with over the counter medicines and insist on procedures that are unnecessary or non-essential. The result is that people who really need treatment suffer – “you have six months to live unless you have this surgery, but we don’t have a doctor available for nine months”.

And if health care is available to all, at least to everyone with a job, who is to say what is ‘necessary’ or ‘essential’? Who will control your health care choices? And who pays the cost for people who can’t, don’t or won’t work, due to disability, illegal alien status or just plain laziness?

The other reason business shouldn’t be required to pay for health insurance is that the lack of generally available care is only indirectly their fault. The real issue is the cost of health care, which has increased exponentially since companies started providing health insurance as a benefit. In mid-Michigan, when the unions forced the auto companies to provide health insurance, health care doubled and tippled, as what was covered was expanded in the contracts, leaving those without union jobs, without insurance, to suffer.

And no, the ‘government’ shouldn’t be responsible for health care either, for many of Read More »