Xsarus wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Stuff about government involvement making everything bad
You wouldn't in the US either. If we turned the clock back a bit and adopted a more sane private care system.
Normal yearly "maintenance" type care is paid for out of the pockets of each individual, and handled directly by local general care physicians (the local doctor as it were). That individual can choose to change the prices based on the fortunes of those he's caring for (charge less for people who can't afford his normal prices typically). This was the norm up until the system was gobbled up by the insurance process. Now, you have to fill out paperwork and itemize all the costs. There are no breaks or reductions, so the total cost is higher as a result (and that's on top of the overhead for the system in the first place).
It is absurd to treat this form of care as an insured thing. I already explained why. Insurance simply doesn't work in that situation.
Major medical costs are born by insurance. They cover *only* expensive stuff that would bankrupt any single person. See. As I pointed out, insurance works if the situation is like a gamble. If we can expect one out of every 100 people to require some sort of major medical expense each year, we can get all 100 people to pay a small premium and then use the money collected to provide that expensive care, and cover the costs of the system itself. It's like a lottery, except you probably don't want to win. You just want to be covered if something goes wrong.
Of course, it only works because on average every single person will pay more than he gets back in medical care. It has to (stop and think, and you'll see why). If the care is spread evenly, no one would ever buy insurance. They'd just pay for the care and pocket the savings. The key is that since it's a rare event and none of those 100 people know which of them will require the care, all of them will be willing to pay on the off chance that they are the unlucky one.
It's exactly the same concept as car insurance. It only works financially if every participant pays more on average than he'll receive over time (costs for those handing the money have to be covered). However, you don't know if you're going to get into an accident, do you? Thus, each participant is willing to pay that money, knowing that statistically he's likely to lose money but knowing that if he's unlucky and gets into an accident, he'll get a net gain (costs to cover are greater than what he's paid into the system). This is how insurance works. It only works if the payout events are relatively rare and the participants don't know if they're going to be a recipient.
You cannot cover day to day medical costs with any sort of insurance system. It simply doesn't work. Those costs are relatively known and steady. You know you're going to see your doctor X times a year, get sick Y times, need Z quantities of medicines, etc. Yet, they still have to collect more money in premiums then the market value of that care. Thus, every single participant loses money. We'd all literally be better off if our medical insurance only covered the old "major medical" situations (which would reduce the cost for that insurance massively btw), and then simply took the extra money we're not paying for the insurance into our bank accounts and spent it as needed for normal doctor visits, checkups, flu shots, medicine, etc...
It would be cheaper all the way around. And I do believe there would be secondary effects that would further reduce costs (the private market forces would return, which are largely absent now). The point is that we had a workable system back in the 1950s and early 60s, and we tossed it out and replaced it with a huge bloated system that doesn't work. We should go back to the original method. It worked pretty darn well.
