Not to mention that it is fraud.
And you believe that Government health care will be the answer?
How?
Trying to make life fair, simply makes it unfair for everybody.
Interesting. They only want to insure people that will never need the coverage. It’s a great way to make money.
This isn’t news. It’s been common practice in the health insurance industry for decades.
The whole idea of insurance is that it provides indemnification for a possible, future event ... not an ongoing, current event. You can’t buy life insurance for a person who has already died, auto insurance to pay for a collision you had last week, or health insurance to cover an illness you’ve already contracted or surgery that’s in the past.
There are mechanisms to get someone else to pay for these occurences (tort law, government handouts) but those are not “insurance,” simply confiscation from someone else by force.
Actually the insurance system is so broken and overregulated that for all practical purpose we have have ‘government health care’, with two slight differences:
(1) Private insurance companies make a profit that is a lot the like the guaranteed profit made by private utility companies.
(2) The bureaucrats at private insurers are slightly more competent and responsive than government bureaucrats.
One problem is that health ‘insurance’ is not insurance at all. Insurance is intended to help people manage unpredictable risks: fires, floods, unexpected loss of life. The most common and costly health conditions are fairly predictable based on a persons age, genetics, current health and habits. For the most part health insurance doesn’t pay for unpredictable risks, it pays for predictable recurring costs.
The whole idea of insurance is large groups of people pooling their resources to provide for unpredictable risks. Events that are significant enough to allow people to collect from the common pool (death of an person, a home burning down, a ship sinking) are sufficently severe, that’s there’s relatively small danger of individuals needlessly drawing from the pool.
However, for the case of health ‘insurance’ where people regularly make use of the services, we are just paying into the system to have a set of bureacrats pay our recurring expenses. Not only is it inefficient, but individuals lose control of their health care. Doctors and hospitals no longer thing of patients as the customers that they aim to please; their customers are now the insurance companies that control the payments. Imagine a world where we all buy electricity, gas, water, and sewer insurance, to pay our monthly bills in those areas. There would be a huge costly bureaucracy to support, we’d have to deal with cancelation notices every month because the insurance company and the water company were debating fair payment, and our helpful insurance companies would undoubtedly be trying to offer advice and control of our utlity usage habits.
The current system is almost as bad as the nationalized system that Obama wants to foist on us. What we need to do is:
* Decide what minimal level of health care we want everyone in society to have regardless of ability to pay. Most people are not prepared to see kids being denied vaccinations, mothers in labor not having access to hospitals hospitals, broken bones not being set, or critically ill patients being turned away from emergency rooms. Costs for those expenses need to be covered by government or a quasi-public identity.
* For all other expenses, go back to the system where the individual pays their doctor or hospital directly. Give me back the thousands of dollars taken from my paycheck for helath insurance and add the thousands of dollars my employer contributes in ‘matching’, and let me decide to do with that money. Maybe I want to try to treat my mild diabetes with diet and exercise; maybe I want to take Metformin to manage blood sugar. Maybe I want laser surgery to improve my vision to 20-20, or maybe I like my glasses just fine. Give individuals the responsibility and power to look after themselves. Oh and if I’m the one paying the $100 for my checkup out of my own pocket, I kind of doubt I’ll have to wait an hour after my scheduled appointment.
Insurance companies should be forced to take all comers at the same rate even if they know that their costs are guaranteed to be higher than the premiums collected.
While we are at it, let's force insurers to do the same with auto coverage. They should be forced to cover repairing damages even if the damage already existed before the policy was written.
What could possibly go wrong?
Mortgages for alcoholic crack heads on food stamps who smoke cigarettes and use food stamps.
Free Health insurance, of course, for the same people!
Insurance companies, hospitals, and doctors are really into it for the money, what a news flash!!!! LOL!!!
The irony is that most people have a condition of some sort by their 30s or 40s.
The whole concept of insurance was developed during an age of “incomplete information”. The internet has changed this, just as it has been changing a number of paradigms and associated enterprises for years now.
We have all heard of marriages staged to get into the US. Has anyone heard of people getting married so that a spouse or stepchild can get medical coverage?
Refusing to take pre-existing conditions is going to buy us government health care. Wait and see.