Health Care-- kind of

And the Beggar Nation If you cannot afford health care insurance the new health care law, obamacare, has within it a provision where you can go petition HHS for an exemption due to 'hardship.' So some government beurocrat at HHS is going to tell you according to some government regulation whether you can or can not afford to buy health insurance. If you could afford it you would have it now. Can you imagine the nightmare scenarios of people having to go before some agency, taking time out of their day, battling the government over whether they deserve this exemption to be declared by the government a hardship case. Where is the dignity in that? Can you imagine some housewife standing in a government office for lines longer than she has time to wait with a crying baby to explain that the boiler just blew, she needs new tires, she is two months behind on the mortgage and her husband just left her? Seriously. And if she can't convince that guy that she shouldn't refinance her house to pay for insurance (or prove that she already did twice and that still has her in hot water because the house is worth much less than the mortgage debt now and she carries two notes with interest) she gets hit with yet another cost burden that she has to pay to the IRS or the tax man is going after her for CRIMINAL tax evasion. The bill has the potential to turn the working poor into criminals. Although I can see this being the solution to what we do with unemployed attorneys looking for pro bono work as armies of lawyers will be needed just like in the SSI context to help that category of people who are the one tenth percent now in mortgage foreclosure proceedings because they can't afford their mortgages, this law is a bad law. Also in the SSI case there will not be enough pro bono lawyers to address all the crying shame wrong decisions of the government beurocrat. The law doesn't address the most major issue- cost of health care. That was the problem. This is not the solution. If the government is forcing you to buy something unaffordable or get hit with some other cost burden, the government is not helping. The 45 or so million without insurance who motivated the rational behind the act likely overlap with the ten percent whose houses are in foreclosure proceedings. If they cannot afford it, making them buy it is like saying "just buy a house stupid" to the homeless. There are other things that don't add up in this 'too unintelligible to be enforceable as arbitrary' act. It should in whole or part be sent back to the Congressional drawing board. Whether the Constitutional challenge or an election will do that is up in the air- but the act is bad enough that it is motivating a huge segment of the population to 'pray for relief.' Nice effort though.