It’s not a ‘volume discount’, i.e. like the fact that my company pays far less for printer toner than I do. It’s based on two things: 1) typically people who have jobs that offer health insurance are in better health; and 2) by offering it as a benefit as part of your compensation, they get a far better participation rate from low risk people, 22 year olds etc. – otherwise only the high risk people will get it. As the low risk subsidize the high risk (that’s the way insurance works) the more low risk people you can get in, the lower the price you can offer.

@John — the town hall is in a few hours so you probably won’t see this. My answer to you would be go. Hold fast to your convictions, but go with an open mind. Try to always consider that intelligent, informed people of the best intentions, can see the same facts and reach different conclusions. Go, try to persuade and try to understand the other side. Don’t demonize, and don’t let yourself be demonized.

I find it hard to square Browback’s pro-life position and
Catholic religion with ducking the question of why people
in this country should have different levels of health-care
entitlement based on their earning potential; just like leav-
ing the matter of which babies are born and which are
aborted to the mother’s discretion, letting people receive
inferior levels of health care–or go begging–so that some
inevitably follow the path to decline and death rather than
have the healthy outcomes that others can assure them-
selves by purchasing more assiduous care–or that their
parents can assure them by being rich and being their
parents and purchasing such care for them–seems like
government falling down in its duty to make sure the lives
of the most vulnerable aren’t unjustifiably deprived them

This is buying into a fair bit of socialism, but i think the
above questions inquiring into his Christian outlook on the
issue and how it doesn’t lead him to envision some more
active role for the government when there’s no other
agent in society that’s going to be able to guarantee that
people aren’t dying unnecessarily (let alone that people
aren’t driven into financial ruin by a medical calamity) are
important ones for him to have answers for before his
maker asks him and the rest of us the Matthew 25
questions

Really? You can’t see why group rates make things cheaper?

Personally, I don’t understand why private individual insurance isn’t getting much attention; there’s no excuse for it being cheaper for someone’s employer to be able to ensure them more cheaply than they can insure themselves. Seems a no-brainer for reform from either a social justice perspective or a free market one to me…

But then I’ve got both good government provided healthcare and good, affordable, private individual coverage provided by an international corporation that’s basically a mutual society writ large…

I don’t recall your employer, and a quick search didn’t turn them up, but I’d guess you probably work for a tech company, possibly a FOSS-friendly one. Thus, that sounds like the perfect venue to bring up topics such as ACTA, warrantless wiretapping, and the DMCA/DMCRA.

And yeah, she mentioned the KDOT ball-dropping as well, though if you read ODOT’s take on it, it sounds to me more like that’s just Oklahoma’s excuse to run through Tulsa instead. Given Oklahoma politics (and geography), I suspect if an excuse hadn’t been provided they’d've had to invent one. Tulsa’s an 800-pound gorilla sometimes. (The existence of both the “Oklahoma State Fair” and the “Tulsa State Fair” says much about both state and city.)

I do agree with *you* on passenger rail, and the Heartland Flyer. KDOT also has really dropped the ball. You might check out northflyer.org, FYI.

Heck, maybe I’d ask that even if it *was* supposed to be a healthcare-only thing. Because I think we could all use a break from *that*.

If he comes back with something about that referring to individuals, rather than to Government, you could point out that he is an individual and there’s nothing in the Bible that I’m aware of granting people in powerful Government positions an exemption from caring for the needy.

(full disclosure: although I was raised Christian, I’m now an atheist. I think Jesus had the right idea on most things to do with morality, though)

I’d love to hear a real answer for why protection from illness should be any different – especially when the elderly are already covered under socialized medicine.