Sunday, September 6, 2009

Why a single system cannot work (aka, why the Democrats would have to be idiots if the conservatives were telling the truth about them)

One of the things that the Right in this country is saying about Health Care reform is that it will abolish private health insurance and require everyone to be on the government's one system. Aside from the fact that the actual bill says that they are only providing an option it would be moronic to force everyone to use the same system (a quick search on wikipedia shows that England and Canada still have private insurance despite most using the public option). People are different, what works for one person won't necessarily work for another.

I have realized this not because of my experience with health insurance (though my family has experienced difficulty getting approved because of my autism, my mother's pituitary, and my brother's wrists), but because of my University's policies on antivirus software. The school provides a variation of Symantec corporate edition free of charge and it seems to work for most people but for some reason it doesn't on my computer (I had it my first semester and I needed to get my computer wiped twice because of the connectivity and start-up problems it caused). But the real problem is that a program called Cisco Clean Access Agent is also required, if your antivirus software is not approved it doesn't let you access the internet, however it ceases to recognize a program that isn't the school provided one after a major update (for example, Norton Internet security going from v.16.5 to v.16.7 over the summer). So I'm going to sign out and watch Babylon 5 before my guest access ends now.

1 comment:

Jeweler Mom said...

Okay, I don't know about your computer woes but I'd like to clarify something about single payer health care. I am one of those lefties who thinks single payer - government is that single payer - health care is the best thing for the country. But that doesn't mean people can't buy supplemental insurance from a private company on top of the public insurance. That's how private companies are still working in Canada and the UK. People have socialized medicine but if they choose they can buy private insurance to cover orthodontics and other cosmetic dental care or cosmetic surgery or additional therapies not covered by the government. Senior citizens in the US also can buy private insurance on top of their socialized care Medicare.