…you know, the huge trillion-dollar octopus that runs our health care system as a vast casino? The shaming ones, always brandishing actuarial tables and beating Americans up on things like “risk factors” and “risky Zip Codes” and “moral hazard” and “pre-existing conditions” and “acts of God,” and backing it up with tables of rates that quickly skyrocket if you, say, smoke, or eat fatty foods, or don’t belong to a gym, or have an accident while not wearing your glasses, or live in Watts or West Hollywood or South of Market, or have a sudden health emergency from inhaling fumes not AT work exactly, but out in the parking lot at 5:15. These insurance geeks are the medical geniuses who decided that, if a policyholder is prudent and asks the doctor to test for certain chronic diseases, or needs certain tests regularly, he will get summarily dropped from the plan. A hundred thousand things we can’t do in modern society, or are afraid to do, are too poor to do, because the insurance companies don’t like it or won’t allow it.

But if you are an American who chooses not to mask, not to social distance, or refuses to get a Covid-19 vaccine? They’re just fine with that. They’ve got you covered — and apparently are okay with everyone else in your community getting infected! They won’t raise your premiums or cancel your policy or make you do regular testing, or insist on a robust quarantine to try to protect the community. Big Insurance honors your guts and your freedom. So far, no super-spreader yahoo or casual moron has been told his activities are shamefully reckless and expensively idiotic. None of the thousand stories of selfishly insane behavior, of feckless, entitled narcissism, of unhinged melt-downs in the Trader Joe’s line, have resulted in a letter of cancellation, nor a single penny being added to anybody’s monthly premium.

IT MAKES YOU THINK.
President Biden of Delaware is the grandfather, or should I say The Godfather, of America’s whole medical insurance racket, and the engineer of the whole ACA. Since Covid-19 hit, insurers have maintained complete silence about “how they’re going to pay for all this,” as they’re always asking progressives when we bring up Universal Care. With every hospital in America burning fast and bright for a year and a half, and staff cut to the bone by disease and burnout, the medical industry’s Wall Street prices have only soared. It seems Pres. Biden has simply reassured them that the coffers of the U.S. treasury are open to them any time they like, day or night, here’s a key to the back door, take what you need. Insurers have expressed no fear of picking up the increasingly astonishing tab for the trillions of dollars the epidemic is obviously costing. Are insurers just happily absorbing people’s hospital bills? I doubt millions of sick families across America are able to just shrug off high deductibles, or write a 30,000 check for everyone in the family who gets sick.

If the insurers are paying people’s bills, that’s good and all right. And if the government is offering them a blank check, that might even be okay at this point. But a potent tool for stopping the disease is being ignored, and that’s NOT okay, especially given the insurers’ traditional greed and recent meanness. The greatest and most obvious examples of moral hazard in history are Covid-denial and vaccine resistance. If we were a moral nation, and conservatives really cared about “personal responsibility,” or really wanted to use the “Free Hand of the Market” to solve a problem, then why shouldn’t stupid anti-social schmucks be getting their insurance policies cancelled, or rates reassessed, to accurately “cover their risk,” as we‘ve heard all our lives is imperative?