Why should I pay?

If you haven't followed the Frost family controversy closely, join the club.

Someone please correct me if any of these facts are wrong. But as I understand it, the democratic party are using the Frost family as the perfect family example as to why the feds need to cover the SCHIP program. As an article from the Baltimore Sun explains....

Earlier in the week, his younger sister helped congressional Democrats sell expanded funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Yesterday, with the White House threatening again to veto the legislation, it was Graeme Frost's turn to take up the cause.

The 12-year-old Baltimore boy, whose family relied on the government-funded insurance program after he and his sister were severely injured in a 2004 car accident, came to Washington yesterday to record the Democrats' weekly radio address.

"If it weren't for CHIP, I might not be here today," Graeme says in the address, to air today on stations across the country.


However, after some fact checking by the GOP, it has come out that despite the relatively low income in the Frost household, the family actually has quite a number of assets (including cars, their home and/or business property) that could be liquidated or borrowed against to pay for the family's health insurance. In addition, the family's four kids attend a private school; money that could be used for the kids' health insurance.

I will acknowledge that I do not know all the financial issues related to the Frost family. But that's actually the point.

How do we begin a national policy initiative when there are 300 million individual situations across the country?

As an accountant, I'm fully aware of ways to divert income to meet various income parameters; all legal. If you own a C-corporation, you can easily leave earnings in your corporation (let the corp pay the tax) to keep your W-2 earnings low for a few years and the bonus all the earnings out at a later date.

I just read in the paper about a family who tragically lost their 18 year old daughter to a drug overdose after she was just released from a $30,000 rehab program they just paid for.

How do we ask that family to pony up for the Frost's situation?

How do we ask a family to pony up for someone's drug rehab when they have a mother in desperate need of psychological services as a result of bi polar disorder?

How do we ask that family to kick in for the guy down the street who bought way too much house and now can't make his $2,000/month mortgage payment (as is being proposed in New Jersey).

Finally, why should I pay for anyone else's issues, when they won't do everything they can to pay for their own expenses? If the Frosts' thought it was more important to send their kids to private schools, why should I pay for their insurance?

The fact is, each of these situations are tragic in their own way, but how do we pay for any of these and not the other(s)?

As I stated, in a past post, when my business was struggling 10 years ago, one of the first things that I cut was my health insurance but I did not cut beer from my budget. Why in the hell should someone else pay for my health insurance when I could easily pay the premium with my beer budget?