Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
For years, I had an editorial cartoon posted in my work area that showed a panhandler on a street corner with a sign that read, “Will work for health insurance.”
Our healthcare system stifles American ingenuity. It’s the reason some would-be entrepreneurs never venture out on their own; they need to stay on somebody else’s payroll to keep their health insurance.
Let’s say you’re a single man, maybe a little over 60 years old. On the open market, you’ll be lucky to find a decent health insurance policy for $700 a month. And that doesn’t count the high deductible you’ll have to pay with such a policy; if you end up with any sort of serious illness or injury, it’ll cost you thousands more in out-of-pocket expenses.
For a younger man or woman with a couple of kids to provide for, it’s worse. A full family policy could easily cost double that monthly premium. Even a healthy family is going to pay through the nose for a decent plan on the open market.
Chances are, if you are striking out on your own in a business venture, the cost of your healthcare coverage is a major obstacle. If you’re married and have kids, health insurance on the open market is going to cost you dearly.
Our healthcare system is simply too expensive for the average American. That’s why we’ve created programs to offset the costs — company-supported health insurance plans, VA services for military veterans, Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for low-income families, and for about 10 years now, the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
With company plans, employees pay a portion of the insurance while the company pays the rest (often at reduced rates for their multiple-policy purchases). With Medicare and Medicaid, your healthcare costs are covered for the most part, though you still need a supplemental policy to cover what Medicare doesn’t.
But for people like that 60ish-year-old small business man I mentioned, none of those do him any good.
Since buying a small business of his own, he’s on no one’s payroll, so buying into a company plan is out of the question. And he’s a little too young for Medicare and is earning a little too much for Medicaid, and he’s not a vet, so the ACA (also known as Obamacare) is his best option for buying into an affordable healthcare policy.
That’s what he’s been doing for the past couple of years. Last year he took out a middle-of-the-road policy that costs $700 per month, but because of his modest income as a small businessman, he qualified for an ACA “tax credit” of nearly $600 — thereby leaving me, er, him with just a little over $100 a month to pay.
That’s a good deal for anyone. Thank you, Obamacare, for helping to keep an independently owned small business man covered.
I’ve never quite understood why the Republicans, for years now, have been so hell-bent on destroying the ACA. We have an astronomically expensive health-care system and the ACA helps millions of people get affordable coverage. It’s helping our “free enterprise” economy in ways that all the other government programs don’t.
Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:
