Shortly after the fire I went through our homeowner's insurance pretty thoroughly and discovered precisely what we are and are not covered for. Insurance isn't a general safety net; there are different packages and you have to pay extra for stuff like expensive jewelry. One thing we were not covered for was earthquakes.

Which makes sense if you think about it. Insurance works if everyone pays even if they're not in trouble. The company is able to take the proceeds from everyone who doesn't have shit happen to them to pay for those who do. In my case it's easily coverable because I was an isolated incident in a city of millions of people. If that city with millions of people is simultaneously hit by an earthquake, the insurance company goes bankrupt sending checks for all of those destroyed homes at once. So if you want earthquake coverage, you need to pay a higher premium annually for it to be economically feasible for them.

And that's the problem Obamacare is facing today. Because of the bipartisan fights to get this out, the bill didn't require everyone to sign up and instead would just fine them in taxes. So the people who immediately joined Obamacare were sick people, whereas the healthy are choosing the fine because it's cheaper or their local insurer doesn't give good options. But that also means that some insurance companies are now going out of business because they don't have enough healthy people paying to cover the sick.

It's a tricky problem. National health coverage would be great, but financially it's not working out as smooth as we'd hoped. There are things we can try like trying to rein in health costs or maybe force everyone to sign up for health insurance instead of just fining them, although the latter was shot down by the Supreme Court. Republican governors are becoming more receptive to Obamacare, but that doesn't help the sick/healthy dilemma.

I feel the issue has become so politicized that each side is unwilling to see anything out of their own party's stance. There is a health problem in this country, and we should address it. Conversely talking about costs doesn't necessarily make you a demon. Unfortunately this debate has already gone into crazy territory on both sides, so I'm not really certain a solution is possible any time soon.