F'rinstance ... at MY age ... I don't think I'll break a leg so much as develop cancer .... certainly ain't gettin' pregnant, and I have false teeth
Whado I need pregnancy and dental care ( I know ... almost non existent anymore) insurance for?
Maybe we could reduce the cost of a band aid through the back door of the hospital/AMA monopoly
What I find funny is that when I try to find out what health insurance would cost me (for tax prep reasons - we have no insurance) it is IMPOSSIBLE to get accurate info without giving someone a phone number so they can call you.
like progressive car insurance?
Stop trying to make sense. The government doesn’t like it when we use logic and reason.
I wish cable companies would do the same. I’d like to pick and choose what channels I get.
If I recall correctly, Obamacare mandates that every insurance plan must include certain things, like pregnancy coverage, whether you want them or not.
Just remember that when someone tells you that the USA is a free society.
They need to sell you something you’ll never use. If you were allowed to only select the things that you know you will use, they would lose money.
Insurance never goes down. It only gets more expensive.
Regulation. Even before Obamacare, states mandated certain things be covered.
What you really want is a catastrophic plan and a free market for everything else.
You get a new car if you get in a wreck, but you don’t expect “insurance” to pay for tires and wiper blades.
Because thats expressly forbidden under Obamcare.
It used to be you COULD compare policies and choose what you wanted covered. Zero “fixed” that.
I think on the same lines.
And if that isn’t practical why not a policy that insures, say, 95% (or some per cent) of the health cost people in an age group are expected, actuarially, to have?
Because it was always heavily controlled by the feds and state governments. Thats why its never been transportable across statelines. If you could only by the services you need then those companies would lose money.
Nationalization of health care started in the late 60’s when Ted Kennedy pushed for European style HMOs. This was a way to whip up hatred of putting people other than your doctor in control of your medical care. They knew this would happen so they kept tweaking health care laws incrementally until we arrived where were currently are today.
The reason for skyrocketing malpractice also came from the 60’s when doctors would have free clinics to care for “inner-city” patients who didn’t have access to care. But then the liberal lawyers decided that level of care wasnt as good as their paying patients would get and began suing...
Theoretically possible, but the complexity of the actuarial calculations is stunning.
Remember that insurers make money by creating risk pools, estimating the actuarial risks across those pools, setting premiums at *slightly* above the projected costs to insure and administer those risks, and then investing the revenues until they have to pay out. (I know of one insurer, for instance, that actually for several years in the 1990s priced its disability policies below the market price for the insured risks because it was able to make a profit on investing the premiums).
The pools are important, and this is what Obamacare is trying to get at. The larger the number of people in the pool, and the more standardized the policy, the easier it is to sell those policies at profit. That’s why Obamacare policies for men include coverage against ovarian cancer and for mammographies, and women have to pay for policies that include screening for prostate cancer. With the larger pools, there are more healthy people (who would often otherwise not buy insurance or would buy only catastrophic insurance) in the pool and fewer actuarial variations that have to be priced out.
It also involves a moral hazard issue. Under the a la carte plan, the only people who will buy insurance for diabetes, for instance, are people with a history of diabetes in their families or those who are risk averse. The cost to insure that pool will increase until it equals (1) the actual medical cost, discounted to present value, of treating diabetics plus (2) a profit margin and overhead for the insurer. At the theoretical top end of this, it would be cheaper to simply pay out of pocket for treatment because you don’t have to pay for the insurer to get in the mix.
That’s why insurance for known, necessary expenses is just stupid. Think about hair cuts. Unless you do it yourself or are bald, you need haircuts. We could set up an insurance system to cover those expenses. Assuming the bald and DIYers are permitted to opt out, the only people who will purchase the insurance are those who are likely to need it. So you go to your barber with your hair cut insurance card. The barber used to charge $10 on a cash basis, but now has increased administrative costs to deal with the insurance policies and increased risk of non-collection because insurers suck. The barber will have to increase charges to cover these costs, so your haircut will now cost $15. Additionally, the insurer will have to charge you premiums to cover the expected costs of the haircut ($15) plus its overhead and profit, meaning that your premiums will increase to $20 per haircut that used to cost $10 without insurance.
Additionally, because of the smaller and more specialized risk pools, with fewer healthy people in the mix to balance out the risk and pay premiums that cost more than their actual risk, the cost of insurance will rise across all risk pools.
So the long and short of it is that the insurance market simply cannot make it on an a la carte basis because of the moral hazard and actuarial problems it raises.
The possible responses to this are two-fold. The statist, communitarian response is Obamacare: force everyone into the risk pool. The market solution is self-insurance and catastrophic risk policies. There are actually lots of ways to mix those that may produce a workable market while making sure the stupidest people will still have access to health care. Rezident Zero, of course, chose the absolute worst of all options.
Simply because they want you to pay for coverage that someone else needs/wants.
That’s a big part of Obamacare - that everyone is required to have “full” insurance so that those who need both prostate and pregnancy coverage can be in the same pool as you.
I built a system like that in the late 80’s for a family member in the insurance business. It looked at all the underwriting guidelines for 2 dozen or so companies then compared the deductibles, co pay and coverages. It took those common elements and then allowed the end user to pick what they wanted or drop what they wanted to drop when possible. Then it looked at the basic rating tables and compiled rates and then compared those.
The problem with individual health insurance is that like automobile or home insurance the companies are regulated by the state and the policies are only sold within the state. Which is a good thing for those property and casualty lines of insurance because the physical risks vary by geography, among other things. Health insurance, like life insurance is based on the person. When you can cluster large groups of similar risks you can calculate losses forward with a great deal of accuracy. The simple fix to individual health insurance is to allow companies to sell across state borders. For example, if you have 1,000 registered nurses in a state your pool is much different if you have 100,000 registered nurses across the country in a risk pool. The loss experience is different, etc.
The thing called ObamaCare is not insurance by the way. It works in a fashion like federal flood “
insurance” which is not insurance either. Both take adverse risks (pre-existing conditions) and use monies from good risks to subsidize bad risks. In the case of federal flood “insurance” what Congress did is an even bigger joke because regular income tax payers subsidize the so-called flood insurance. After catastrophes the system which is not based on any real actuary foundation runs out of money and then Congress pushes money blocks from the US Treasury in to the NFIP. This is done through FEMA. The even bigger joke is that since they are using borrowed money (The US is broke) the math is simply retarded if you view it from a real insurance viewpoint. Simply put, a fellow who lives on top of a mountain in the desert pays via his income taxes that go to pay US debt service for flood “insurance” losses a fellow has had who built stupidly on the beach or outside of New Orleans:)
Politicians are unqualified to do most anything in comparison to the capitalistic system that allows companies to compete for providing goods and services. In this case insurance. Dump ObamaCare and allow health insurance companies to issue policies countrywide and the problem is mostly solved.
Unfortunately, most members of Congress and certainly the moron that is president cannot handle simple math and they cannot even come close to grasping the things they pass laws about.
The socialization of risk/responsibility (insurance) collective socialists have the responsible right where they want them. Paying.
Pay for another socialist scheme…and another…and another.
Stay healthy my friend…and pay…and pay…and pay…and
Die
What? You mean actually have an effective market in health insurance? We can’t have that. Too many companies base their entire business model on lack of transparency provided by the current system.
Duncan Hunter wanted to do this very thing
Insurance controlled by political hacks at the state level. It is used as a political weapon. When a goobernor wants more votes they have the state insurance commissioners add more goodies to required services. I am a male. I don’t need gynecological services but I still have to pay for them.