Democrat Symp Says Personal Responsibility Is Overrated

Bill King claims "Personal responsibility won’t trim health costs" (Thursday Outlook), but he relies on clichés and non sequiturs to make his point.  First, he conflates old age and susceptibility to disease with lifestyle diseases resulting from smoking, overeating and addiction, implying that all three are equal in their occurrence.  They're not.  Lifestyle diseases and preventable injury account for well over half of all health care expenditures. 

 

Second, he implies that old age means you're automatically going to get sick, conveniently leaving out the fact that the bulk of illness in old age is caused by the bad lifestyle choices people made when they were younger.  It is true that emphasis on personal responsibility is not a cure-all, but for King to say that it plays no role at all simply keeps us on the same berserk spending curve we have been on since the 60s, and that the Obama administration put on steroids with the Affordable Health Care Act.

 

Ironically, the implementation of Obamacare will prove him wrong.  The only winners of are the poor, who will get 100% coverage at virtually no cost.  In contrast, the vast majority of job holders get policies with huge premium increases and deductibles so high that they will end up paying the bulk of their health care costs out of pocket.  Working people will have no choice but to live responsibly, or go bankrupt. 

 

The irony is that people who work will be forced to live responsibly and simultaneously subsidize the costs of health care for the poor, who now have virtually no incentive to live a healthy lifestyle.  The inevitable result is to cripple the economy by driving people out of the job market and onto the dole, and we're already seeing that happen.  On this subject, Bill King is silent.

 

Pete Smith

Cypress, TX