Health Insurance Mandates?

Yeah, right.

How is that going to work?

If you've read anything at all here, you know I'm for health care reform---meaningful health care reform. Health care reform that is for the American people, not the corporations and insurance and pharmaceutical companies, etc.

Like the single-payer option we should have had since there are 1300 different insurance companies in the country, each with their own, different forms.

It's estimated that if the government mandated one form for all these companies, we could save, as a nation, $350 billion a year--enough to pay for health care reform.

But are we getting that?

Heck no.

According to Matt Taibbi of the Rolling Stone magazine, the President buckled on that item right up front, to the corporations.

But that's another story.

What I don't get is about mandating that Americans buy health insurance in order to make this whole health care reform happen.

Questions for the President:

1) How do you "mandate" that all Americans have health insurance? How does that work? How can anyone require that we have it?

If you can't afford health care insurance now, how can you afford it just because it's been required by the government? I don't see that happening.

2) How is this "mandate" enforced? Will there be "health insurance police"? If so, who is that? If not, how does this get enforced?

3) If the government would be requiring we all get and pay for health insurance, is that Constitutionally legal? It certainly goes against all the "freedom" Americans have always demanded and been accustomed to.

4) The insurance companies get their big "win" with all the new customers--why didn't we get the "single-payer option" we needed and that makes so much sense? Did you, in fact, buckle on this, Mr. President and give it away, in effect?

5) Why isn't it "in the can", too, that we'd be getting a "public option", so the insurance companies have competition--instead of the collusion between them all they now have--and we could get and keep insurance premiums down?

As two examples, it's well known we have the most expensive health care system in the world, yet we don't have the healthiest populace--by far--on the planet and two, the insurance companies keep raising their rates capriciously and at will. That one, last month, tried to raise rates 39%, for pity's sake, in the middle of this health care debate and reform.

Now that's chutzpah.

If they can do that now, during this debate, imagine what they can and will do--still without the "public option" and more, true competition--after all this goes away and dies down? It'll be "Katy bar the door" for them on rates, then, most likely.

For now, Mr. President, I'll leave you with those questions.

I just don't see how this is going to work, first, and second, I don't see how this is the huge help to the American people that it's supposed to be.

I hope it is a help and I hope I'm wrong but as the C3PO said in "Star Wars", I have a bad feeling about this...