“They don’t know what they are doing. They are going to be the ruin of this country,” the local conservatives said of developers of the Affordable Health Care Act.

It doesn’t matter exactly who the local conservatives in this particular case are. They are not the only two in the area who subscribe to the notion of fear of the legislation commonly called Obama Care.

I can agree that Affordable Care supporters don’t know what they are doing – exactly.

Nobody really knows the outcome of legislation that ensures health care to all. So not knowing what the outcome will be, we don’t know whether the legislation will be the ruin of the country.

What we can be more assured of is that failure to make changes in the current system will be the ruin to our country.

Several questions arise in my mind.

Is it possible that the Affordable Care Acre will encourage rather than discourage business development?

How many people do you know who work for corporations or small companies mostly for health insurance. Some work at a wage that provides them little more money than what is needed to pay health insurance premiums.

If people with an entrepreneurial spirit could get insurance without relying on a job they hold simply for the sake of insurance, might they not pursue their business passion? Might they not seek to pursue an idea they love and make more money doing it? How do we know what effect their freedom to pursue new ideas might have on the economy?

Secondly, many of the uninsured are healthy, young people, who don’t feel they need to have access to health insurance.

They are healthy.

If our health care payment system can spread the hazard of insuring people over those healthy individuals, who will ultimately need health care at some point, won’t that increase the volume of business, companies do and lower the cost per customer?

Some of those uninsured, of course, are the people who are unhealthy and can’t afford to buy insurance. They use emergency rooms like the ones at Baptist Easley, Cannon Memorial and AnMed in place of their primary physicians. Many of those patients can’t pay or pay minimal amounts monthly forcing the three hospitals mentioned to write-off bad debt of in the millions. The cost to the hospitals doesn’t simply go away, of course, insured patients and private pay patients pick up the tab.

We are paying for it, but we aren’t admitting that we are paying for it. The cost is obscured by this level of bad debt. Failure to openly acknowledge the cost is a bad business practice for most companies.

Wouldn’t we be better off finding a way of paying these bills up front? The Affordable Health Care Act seems to attempt that.