Talking to a friend, I realized a few more things about my health care realizations.

It isn't quite true, as I have been suspecting, that the likeliest contested outcomes of the current health care & insurance reform fights now ongoing in congress would have absolutely no affect on me. I found something that matters to me, and, thankfully, it's not even something that's hotly contested among the party that matters: the Democrats. It's not even specifically contested by Republicans - although they certainly want to block it as part and parcel of sending anything even spoken of politely by the Democratic majorities down in flames.

Surprisingly, it isn't the public option.

As I mentioned in my last post on this subject, it seems that health insurance is less about protecting health as it is in protecting financial assets. But it isn't just catastrophic emergency care that bankrupts people - it's slow, creeping diseases. Parkinson's, Alzheimers, Cancer. None of these will send you to the emergency room to get the kind of care they can't refuse to the indigent. It WILL cost your ass an arm and a leg. For emergency care, insurance doesn't mean the difference between getting or not getting care. But for some illnesses, it does. In those situations, insurance means more than mountains of debt that don't matter anyway - it means the difference between persistent suffering and living a livable life.

So I'll be very happy to see provisions in most of the bills being debated - provisions that aren't really being debated themselves - that would prohibit private insurance companies from denying coverage or claims on the basis of pre-existing conditions.

So this will mean that, so long as I'm healthy, I have the freedom to "game the system" and not buy insurance until I really need it.

Now, insurance companies will say (and I understand where they're coming from) that it's not really fair to allow people to do that. That would be like being able to buy home insurance after your house burned down. But really, I don't have much sympathy for this argument, because those who make it just happen to be the very same assholes who refuse to tolerate the really quite modest tax increases that would be needed to fund what every other developed country in the world has taken for granted for decades: single payer health care.

So suck it up, fat cats: You're lucky enough you don't have to pay for my prescriptions, check-ups and flu shots. I think you can help pay for some of the costs of chemotherapy for the destitute and indigent if they happen to need it.

Now, granted, they still have the balls to wedge in a personal mandate, requiring all Americans to fork out for some form of insurance. Without a public option, this amounts to a despicable handout to an insurance industry that doesn't deserve it. I know I'm sure as hell not going to give these fuckers my money, even if it means having to pay penalties to the government instead. But at least I know I'll be able to get some kind of actual insurance when I know I'll need it.