Ah, another day, another pathetic argument in favor of requiring Americans to pay Wellpoint a tithe or else the IRS comes after their paychecks.

After a bit of rambling on how health-care and health insurance aren’t the same thing (no shit, Sherlock), and a bit of history on how ERs are supposedly forced to cover the uninsured (a practice that works far better in theory than in reality, as hospitals deny urgent care all the damn time), Kay over at BJ rolls out with this chestnut:

You don’t have to buy health insurance. You don’t have to pay a private insurer. What you do have to do is contribute to the costs of covering the pool called “the uninsured” because if you don’t purchase the subsidized policy and instead pay the tax penalty, you’ll be uninsured. And it costs to provide emergency care to “the uninsured”. A lot. And the federal government reimburses part of that cost.

This is fantastic logic! When a law extends penalties enforced by the executive branch, it’s not really saying you *can’t* do something, or that you shouldn’t, it’s just, you know, trying to recoup costs. Let’s extend the reasoning:

You don’t *have* to avoid beating your neighbor to death with a ball-peen hammer; you just have to contribute to the costs of burying them by working the rest of your life making license plates.

Oh wait; that’s fucking stupid sophistry, isn’t it? The law’s primary purpose is clearly to deter murder, just like the primary purpose of the Individual Mandate is *clearly* to coerce people into paying for insurance. Handy hint, Kay: that’s why it goes up from 1 to 2.5% of income. It doesn’t do that because ER costs are anticipated to go up 150% in two years.

But, riddle me this, Kay: if the penalty for the Individual Mandate was really to cover emergency room care, as you claim, then surely it would, in fact, be collected into a separate fund and dispersed to hospitals as needed to reimburse said care, or else set aside specifically to reimburse the costs of ER care in some other fashion, perhaps pooled with other money that goes to that purpose and so forth.

So, is it? Is the Individual Mandate in fact used to raise money for ER care?

Show me the section of the bill where that occurs. I’m intensely curious to know how fining people who don’t want to spend up to 20% of their income annually on insurance they can’t afford to use ends up paying for ER beds under this legislation, because I just can’t find the section. Please, illuminate me on the funding mechanism you’ve outlined here; specific citations to relevant portions of the law would be helpful.

Please do that, or stop making shit up.

Update: The law Kay cites that forces hospitals to cover (limited) ER care regardless of insurance? The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act? It doesn’t provide any funding to hospitals for covering said care. Rather, it uses a big stick, that you have to do so to participate in Medicare.

So, in other words, Kay’s entire argument is full of shit, since the Federal government does not pay for uncompensated ER care today. There is absolutely no mechanism in place to do so, and therefore the Individual Mandate penalty must serve some other purpose.

I wonder what that could be.