There is a basic amount of shared experience that most people in this country have that is often referred to as common sense. People know how to go to the store and buy food, how to put gas in your car and how to get dressed in the morning to go to school or work. Then, there are people who seem to have missed out on some of these shared experiences. One of them is learning what car insurance does. When I was young and poor and a college student, I had an old car and did not have insurance. I probably drove a little more carefully but there was no law that said I had to have it and I was making a choice between insurance and eating.
Our president was presiding over a summit meeting on health insurance this week, but began with a story from his early experience with auto insurance. There is video at the link.
When I was young, just got out of college, I had to buy auto insurance. I had a beat-up old car. And I won’t name the name of the insurance company, but there was a company — let’s call it Acme Insurance in Illinois. And I was paying my premiums every month. After about six months I got rear-ended and I called up Acme and said, I’d like to see if I can get my car repaired, and they laughed at me over the phone because really this was set up not to actually provide insurance; what it was set up was to meet the legal requirements. But it really wasn’t serious insurance.
Now, it’s one thing if you’ve got an old beat-up car that you can’t get fixed. It’s another thing if your kid is sick, or you’ve got breast cancer.
It’s one thing to tell a story and another thing to know what the hell you are talking about !
When you are “rear ended,” the other driver is responsible for fixing your car ! You don’t call your own insurance company; you call the other driver’s insurance company !
OK, so let’s say the other driver doesn’t have insurance. Did he pay the premium for uninsured driver coverage ? Or did he just pay the minimum for liability coverage ? If he didn’t pay for uninsured driver coverage, why is that the insurance company’s fault ?
Some of us choose to buy high deductible health insurance because it is cheaper, we are healthy and we choose to pay for routine care out of pocket. Obama is planning to take away that choice. We will all have to buy Cadillac coverage and, if we can’t afford it, the government will subsidize it. Why is that better ?
How would he know if he doesn’t even know how car insurance works ?
I still wonder who was guiding this guy through life when he was young. It sounds to me like he would starve to death if left to his own devices.
The President appears to be a man with little practical experience. Despite minority status, he appears to have attended exclusively private schools (high school, college, and law school). And he never had a job in a business, well for-profit business. Very little time in the real world. Then he vaults into prominence on the basis of his appearance, his self-assuredness, and his speaking abilities. Absent the last three qualities, I’m not sure what we have here. Certainly a person who doesn’t understand auto insurance.
I’m stunned that he could have said something so boneheaded and out of touch with the reality of day to day life. And he’s an attorney, fer chrissakes! He doesn’t understand about minimum liability insurance? And he wants to reform the entire health insurance system in our country…?
It reminds me of the time Bush the Elder was filmed at a grocery store, evidently trying to score points with the commoners, and stopped in amazement because the cash register scanned the prices automatically. The press tore him up. Any bets they’ll take our fearless leader to task?
I watched a fair amount of the “summit” live. As Obama and the Dems were going through their acts, telling their stories, I was thinking to myself, “I wonder if ANYONE in the MSM will make an effort to check into the various tales of woe and separate fact from fiction.”
Obviously it was a rhetorical question.
(*SNORT*)
BILL
The Bush story was actually a myth, a persistent one as we see. His comment was not about the scanner and it has been debunked.