The Ignorant American (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Ignorance is bliss, or so they say, and I have to admit that there are some things I was happier not knowing. (Recent news out of the Duggar clan tops that list.)

But ignorance can also be dangerous. Perhaps you saw the recent story out of South Carolina: Luis Lang, a 49-year-old who made a comfortable living as a self-employed handyman, ignored the law requiring him to buy health insurance by Feb. 15 — and then discovered that he had bleeding in his eyes and a partially detached retina. Stuff like that happens to diabetics who don’t take care of themselves.

According to Ann Doss Helms’ original story in the Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer, Lang “thought help would be available in an emergency. He and his wife blame President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats for passing a complex and flawed bill.”

There’s so much ignorance here, I don’t know where to start. First there is Lang’s ignorance of how insurance works. No one expects to be able to buy homeowner’s insurance after the house has caught fire, or to buy auto insurance to cover a wreck that already happened. But for some reason, this man — who had made his way through life well enough to own a 3,300-SF home worth $300,000 — thought that he could put off buying health insurance until, you know, he actually needed it.

And then he thought he could buy it at any time.

Before the Affordable Care Act, Lang might have had a hard time buying insurance on the open market because he is a diabetic — and a smoker, as it turns out. With the ACA, he was automatically insurable, but he still needed to sign up by the deadline.

Lang also told the Observer that he had always prided himself on paying his own way, but $9,000 in medical bills completely wiped out his savings. Clearly, Luis Lang was ignorant of just how much it costs to be a diabetic smoker.

He also didn’t understand that, once he couldn’t work because of his eye problem, he was too poor to get tax credits to help pay for the private health insurance he had refused to buy. And he didn’t understand that, because he lives in South Carolina, there was no expanded Medicaid (or anything like Arkansas’ “private option”) to fill the gap until he exhausted all of his assets.

The only thing Lang seems to have understood is that he was supposed to buy insurance but chose not to. So he started a GoFundMe campaign — new-fangled begging from strangers — in order to raise the money he needed for surgery.

After his story came out, a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals actually donated money to help him get the care he needed, often accompanied by lectures. And within a few days, he had renounced his self-identification as a Republican. He was still complaining about how complicated the ACA is — and it is — but mainly he complained about South Carolina Republicans leaving people like him in the lurch by not expanding Medicaid.

Arkansas, of course, accepted the Medicaid expansion money available under the ACA and used it to buy private insurance for a quarter-million of our fellow Arkansans. (As Arkansas Business reported last week, this has resulted in 200 additional jobs at Arkansas Blue Cross & Blue Shield and a big boost in revenue but a somewhat slimmer profit margin.)

Now, if the Republicans who control our Legislature have their way, Arkansas will become like South Carolina after 2016. That sounds politically ignorant to me. If finding out that state-level Republicans refused the Medicaid expansion money caused Luis Lang to abandon the GOP, what will 250,000 Arkansans think when they lose their health insurance?

Perhaps they could be persuaded to blame Obama.

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Another example of American ignorance: U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., withdrew a reported $68,000 from a retirement account last year, and he explained that he needed cash for a $3,000 refrigerator, repairs to his home air-conditioning system, private school tuition for his kids and running for president. The usual stuff.

Rubio is only 43, and he pulled down some $230,000 last year, so he’s going to pay dearly for that $68,000. Deferred taxes plus a 10 percent penalty could easily eat up $30,000 of it. Could there be more expensive money this side of a payday lender?

Honestly, this incident disqualifies Rubio in my mind. It’s bad enough that a guy pulling down nearly five times the national median household income can’t buy a fridge without raiding his retirement savings. It’s astonishing that he thinks that a viable presidential candidate has to spend his own money.

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com.