J. Clarke wrote:

One of the big problems is that the insurance companies are being
forced to cover the uninsured. How does that happen you ask? Well,
hospitals are required by law to give at least a minimal standard of
treatment to anyone who walks into the emergency room, without regard
to means. The laws that require them to do this do not provide any
means of compensating them for the costs incurred. Even nonprofit
hospitals have to recover costs somehow or they run out of money and
can't pay their bills. Thus the means they use to recover costs is
to set their rates so that anyone _with_ insurance gets surcharged to
cover the uninsured.

Yup, 8 to 10% of what we pay for insurance is shifted to cover the costs of
treating uninsured patients (and that's aside from govt. funding used for
the same purpose). Folks who don't want their taxes paying for treating the
uninsured have missed the little detail that their insurance premiums are
doing exactly that right now. Why would anyone be surprised that a
corporation seeking profit would pass on an expense like this to their
insured customers, did anyone seriously believe they would just eat this
expense?

One step toward fixing the system would be a Constitutional amendment
restricting unfunded mandates--if the government says that you _have_
to provide a good or service to someone who cannot reasonably be
expected to pay for it then the government must compensate you for
that good or service.

And where will the govt. get the money? Perhaps from the taxes we pay? It
doesn't matter which pocket the money comes from, it's all the same pair of
pants. So if we're going to pay I'd like to the bill to be as small as
possible. That means keeping people out of the emergency room, i.e.
providing them with less expensive preventative care rather than having them
stumble into the ER when they have no other choice.