{"id":51409,"date":"2014-06-17T08:00:41","date_gmt":"2014-06-17T12:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=51409"},"modified":"2014-06-17T07:28:14","modified_gmt":"2014-06-17T11:28:14","slug":"veterans-should-buy-health-insurance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=51409","title":{"rendered":"Veterans should buy health insurance"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may remember that, in his first few months in office, the President tried to make service-connected veterans buy health insurance. The idea went down in flames eventually, after the Veterans Service Organizations stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the Oval Office. Well, some rocket surgeons, writing in the pages of the New York Times<\/a>, resuscitated the idea. Michael F. Cannon and Christopher Preble think that if veterans were forced to buy health insurance somehow it would prevent war;<\/p>\n

We propose a system of veterans\u2019 benefits that would be funded by Congress in advance. It would allow veterans to purchase life, disability and health insurance from private insurers. Those policies would cover losses related to their term of service, and would pay benefits when they left active duty through the remainder of their lives.<\/p>\n

To cover the cost, military personnel would receive additional pay sufficient to purchase a statutorily defined package of benefits at actuarially fair rates. The precise amount would be determined with reference to premiums quoted by competing insurers, and would vary with the risks posed by particular military jobs.<\/p>\n

Insurers and providers would be more responsive because veterans could fire them \u2014 something they cannot do to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans\u2019 insurance premiums would also reveal, and enable recruits and active-duty personnel to compare, the risks posed by various military jobs and career paths.<\/p>\n

Most important, under this system, when a military conflict increases the risk to life and limb, insurers would adjust veterans\u2019 insurance premiums upward, and Congress would have to increase military pay immediately to enable military personnel to cover those added costs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess the first step would be finding insurance companies who would be stupid enough to insure folks who fight our nation’s wars. It doesn’t seem very profitable to me – which is why the military has it’s own health care system, and there’s a health care system for veterans, because by it’s nature, there’s no chance for a profit in treating service-connected casualties.<\/p>\n

The pair posit the contention that Congress wouldn’t have authorized the use of force in Iraq if they had to consider health care costs before the invasion of Hussein’s Iraq (in the form of a pay increase for the troops to cover the increase in premiums). Do we really want the full force of our foreign policy contingent on the prospective cost of health care? <\/p>\n

Contrary to what the chattering classes believe, sometimes war is the answer and the troops understand what might be the costs to them. In a country that goes to the mall when the troops go to fight their wars, Americans need to accept the job of taking care of those troops instead of trying to find ways to compound their sacrifice. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may remember that, in his first few months in office, the President tried to make … Veterans should buy health insurance<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dumbass-bullshit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}