Health Insurance Debate

Policy disaster? On the contrary, insurance companies love this. They have a counterintuitive conflict of interest - that is, they make more money when health costs are more expensive, through higher premiums.

None of us are perfect.But we have this perfect expectation of how we should and could be in our heads - thinner, fitter, more sensible with money, happier with friends. But we all fail. We just tend to fail in different ways.Some of us are luckier, their satiety levels are lower, their kidney disease markers are low, no bowel cancer, no mental illness.Those people won’t need high insurance premiums. But the point of insurance is not to reward the lucky ones, the whole point of insur

It’s not healthy people paying for your treatment - it’s the underwriter. There don’t need to be any other people with different health outcomes involved. The only thing happening here is you’re outsourcing some risk to someone who has a lot more capital and therefore a more linear risk curve.

Does this still hold when health insurance is factored out?

The problem is that it is no longer an "insurance" system. Insurance should be for an out-of-band emergency illness/treatment, which cannot be handled via out of pocket expenses. In the US, insurance companies have become payment gateways since people tend to use it for every silly thing like minor illnesses.The only way in which ANY insurance business can be profitable is if the circumstance that is insurance is random and un-predictable (think auto-accidents, earthquake, flood, fire). If th

Health insurance is supposed to average the costs though. In many places we have crappy system where that's not really the case, but in general the whole business of insurance relies on the fact that more healthy or lucky people cover the expenses of the less healthy or lucky.If we asked people to really pay for resource usage, why would anyone go with insurance to begin with?

It’s not different, but denying coverage for pre existing conditions is illegal in the US. Also, there is a limit to the ratio between the highest premium and lowest premium in the insurance pool, along with out of pocket maximums so you will still end up with the healthy subsidizing the unhealthy.Incentives to make people healthier should not be a problem with these constraints (max premium rations and guaranteed coverage for everyone). It’s no different than offering a lower car insurance

> This is the whole point of health insurance!This is a serious misunderstanding of what insurance is. Insurance is a net benefit for society because it linearizes individual risk curves even if you have to pay in proportionally to your expected costs, not because it makes less risky people subsidize more risky people. Perhaps you should avoid calling people “stupid” for misunderstanding insurance.

The ideas "medical insurance" and "medical care" should not be conflated. Insurance is a policy against rare, but devastating events. For everything else, a consumer is expected to pay retail prices or take out a subscription plan.Consider the case of car insurance. Do you think you'd need to have an insurance company to pay for oil changes, flat tires or car wash services? If there is a broad policy where the insurance company is obliged to pay for everything, costs would tend to go up becau

Yes, it IS insurance.Its value is not to reimburse you for routine visits or minor procedures, it's to prevent you from going bankrupt if you get cancer or any similarly expensive condition to treat.A useful way to look at it is the cost to treat each condition multiplied by your odds of getting that condition. That's also why pre-ACA, insurers would discriminate against patients with pre-existing conditions: the cost to them was nearly guaranteed to happen as the odds were close