What Outrages You?

http://mentalfloss.com/article/58771/27-offbeat-college-essay-topics
Essay #2 of 27.

America's health care system outrages me more than anything else on earth at this time. The part that outrages me the most is that the solution to the problem of the most expensive and inefficient health care system on the planet is so simple, so obvious, so ridiculously apparent, and yet corporate propaganda and unlimited greed ensures that people like me (and probably any of you reading this) are likely to spend most of our lives burdened by crippling medical debt.

The CEO of Coventry Health Insurance company.

Look, the answer is this simple: universal single-payer. What does this mean? Instead of companies and individuals paying for-profit health insurance companies too much money for not enough coverage, everyone pays a little bit more in taxes (that dirty word) in return for all reasonable and necessary health care expenses to be paid in full.

Look, we all know that this is the reality of health care in America today: you get a job that pays benefits, and these benefits are really expensive for the company that provides them. If you're lucky (and I am in this respect), the company pays your insurance premiums for you. However, almost all health insurance plans have significant deductibles (money you pay before insurance pays a dime), plus "co-insurance" (usually 20% for the individual) that you have to pay even after you meet your deductible.

It's worse if you have a spouse and children on your company health insurance plan. That comes out of my paycheck. Here's the reality. It costs me $900 a month to insure my wife and kids on a plan that has a $5,000 annual deductible (this is what I have to pay before insurance pays) and another $5,000 "maximum out-of-pocket" for co-insurance. If you're doing the math, that comes to an annual health care bill of $20,800 per year.

I'm Superfly TNT—I'm the Guns of the Navarone!

Outrage? Think "Jules Winfield cleaning up Marvin's brain" in the third act of "Pulp Fiction" angry.

What infuriates me is that what these outrageous expenses go toward are primarily the profits of the health insurance company. So what's the solution? Single-payer. If you assessed a five percent tax on my gross income for last year, my share of a national health-care system would come to around $4,000. Even if you don't count my deductible and co-insurance, I'm saving $6,800 right off the top.

Don't let the right wing fool you with horror stories about "socialized medicine." A national health-care system would let doctors make medical decisions instead of insurance company accountants who only care about their bottom line. We already have the system in place—it's called "Medicare." The only people who would suffer are the insurance company CEOs.

By the way, this is essentially the speech that medical collections clerks get from me when they call to jack me up for that extra profit that the hospital gets by charging $3,000 for an MRI or $1,500 for an ER treatment. The most outrageous part of all is that the health care billionaires can afford to buy hours of media propaganda to convince us that this expensive, frustrating, infuriating, outrageous system is the only choice available to us.