Originally posted by BlueKel:
Originally posted by ram1955:
. 2. Paying higher rates when a company's claims increase (whether I've made a claim or not).
There lies the fallacy of the consumer argument. Insurance is not a zero sum game for the individual. Its real purpose is to protect you in the event of a catastrophe. Tell me, if you had a MAJOR health situation - brain surgery, heart surgery, cancer, etc. - who is going to pay for that? Your premiums over your lifetime will not come close to paying the total of all those bills. Is the insurance company just supposed to absorb those losses? How are they paid for?
Insurance is a collection of EVERYONE'S premiums, to pay out everyone's claims. Sure people pay more or less depending on certain characteristics - smoking, etc. Bottom line though is if you had a major event, you'd expect it to be paid for regardless of how much or little you paid in. It is the number/amount of ALL the claims that dictate the rates, not those of an individual.
There are many dragons to slay in the health care/insurance universe. The advent of health insurance more than any other single factor has allowed heath care cost to skyrocket. On the flip side it also has allowed for the advancement of medicine.
Few people had health insurance before the 1960's. The industry therefore had to exist in a model where care was affordable because it was most always paid out of pocket. When health insurance started to become a normal perk that employers gave their workers it created a pool of money from which providers could swim. Advanced medical procedures could become more available because the cost of the procedure became less and less of an issue. Once advanced procedures become the norm, once we have the ability to save a life then the moral question becomes...are you going to allow Joe to die because he cannot pay? If someone is having a heart attack are you going to withhold treatment until you can determine their ability to pay?
With advanced treatments become more opportunities for errors by doctors/medical staff thus doctors have to protect themselves with malpractice insurance. Which created a large pool of cash which attracts people (lawyers) who want to get at that cash.
Hospitals built prior to 1970 or so were normally fairly plain, simply functional buildings. Patients were usually housed 2, 3 4 to a room. My brother broke his hip in 1972 and was in the hospital for a month. There were 2 other patients that shared his room.
Now, does any hospital still have semi-private rooms?
Private rooms reduce the likelihood of patients being contaminated by illnesses from other patients so they are functional but they also increase cost as it requires more real estate to house the same number of patients. As long as insurance is paying the bill it doesn't really matter how much the room charges are...hospitals can build nicer, more ornate buildings to compete against the other hospitals in the area...costs rise.
Health care conglomerates like Humana, HCA, etc buy up older, smaller hospitals in rural areas and funnel patients into newer, more profitable health care centers...
Pharmaceutical companies spend billions bringing drugs to market and once it hits the market there are chemist from China and elsewhere that obtain the drug, analyze its makeup and manufacture generic versions ignoring patent laws and escaping the R&D costs that it took to create the drug in the first place. The US patients get stuck with paying all of those costs.
As for Obamacare... IMHO there are only 2 models that have the ability to control health care costs.
1. Completely eliminate health care and malpractice insurance..., or
2. Create a single payer system where everyone is covered and costs are controlled.
#1 will never happen. I think that Obamacare was designed to fail in order to get us to #2. Pretty much the entire industrialized world minus the US has #2 and their people are much healthier and their health care costs are much lower.
