Posted Feb 16, 2011, 12:23 am
It seems Arizona ranks among the lowest-performing states in the United States for children's health coverage. What the heck are our priorities? Oh, that's right.
The really good news is that the report released this month by the bipartisan Commonwealth Fund, doesn't even reflect the deep cuts in the state health care system implemented by Gov. Jan Brewer last year, including measures that will phase out KidsCare, Arizona's children's health insurance program.
Roberto De Vido writes cartoons and comics about politics, sports (and life) from a small fishing and farming village an hour southwest of Tokyo.
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Easy there, Big Don. Boy, everyone on these here Innernets is so damn TOUCHY!
You ranted about $20,000 cars (that’s paragraph 5, for your reference), and I guess your logic train just confused me.
One thousand pardons.
FYI Roberto de vido,don’t know how you got the impression from my letter that liability insurance is related to the value of the car one drives, I never in the letter indicated that insurance is related to the value of the car one drives. There are 5 paragraphs in my letter, which paragraph is this in?
Don Birkholz
A cartoon that stimulated some discussion! :-)
“Right now, health care insurance companies are free to charge whatever they want, raise rates, deny coverage to whomever they want for practically any reason and even ban people with “pre-existing conditions” (like my high blood pressure) from getting AFFORDABLE health care.”
AJFlick nailed it right there. As kinglaura16 wrote, everyone would like to have health insurance. The question is affordability. If your company pays all or most, you don’t care what it costs. If you are self-employed or unemployed, insurance company price-gouging (and more on that later) can be a matter of life and death.
I live in Japan and for many years have had a health insurance policy with BUPA, a large and reputable British firm. I have a major medical policy because I don’t want or need to pay the premiums for coverage that would give me coverage for every niggle. It’s still expensive, of course.
But here’s the thing: BUPA offers two options: one, global coverage including the U.S.A.; two, global coverage excepting the U.S.A. If I want coverage in the States (i.e. for when I travel there) I double my premiums. And BUPA does that because the cost of delivering health care in the States means they have to.
So I get a travel insurance policy (a big thing here in Japan and obtainable at low cost from a vending machine at the airport) when I travel to the States.
[mtroyal, FYI the main cost of auto insurance is not related to the value of the car you drive; it’s liability insurance covering you if you injure/kill yourself/others. And that, of course, is the main public cost when drivers are uninsured, and the reason the state mandates coverage.]