Actual unretouched photo of health insurance CEOs at work.
Sara Anderson had a comment on the Fucked Again post of a couple of days ago. She said, and I think I'm being fair, (you can look at her comment on that post): That requiring all people to buy insurance would require people who are young and healthy and probably don't now need health insurance to purchase it and therefore make the risk pool larger and since the new people would use the insurance less, the individual cost s/would go down for all. She caused me to think about what I'd written.
To paraphrase myself: I don't agree with what I see as her point. People buy all sorts of insurance (home insurance, life insurance, etc.) without being required to do so. I have family members who have made good livings selling insurance for a long time.
People do not buy health insurance because it is so expensive. When I quit working at legal aid, my wife (du jour) and I continued to pay for insurance even though we were both healthy and relatively young. Even under COBRA the price kept going up and up. Once we were off it sky rocketed. We had no health problems (other than allergies) and were both under forty.
I think the obscene profits and the insurance bureaucracy will simply be continued and institutionalized under mandatory plans forcing people who have little to spend it now on insurance, so the big boys get richer. And the rest of us will continue to be denied or physicians will have to have staffs to simply fight with the insurance industry to get the money out of them
The short answer is that I do not trust the insurance industry to not take the mandatory money and simply use it to increase their profits rather than lower the rates for everyone. I also do not expect service to be any better absent massive government oversight, which will in the long run simply not happen.
2 comments:
I look at it like car insurance, which you have to buy to drive in most states. Here in Idaho, I need to be covered to drive, but no one necessarily has to sell coverage to me. If they find me to be too risky, they'll just drop me and not sell me coverage (even more incentive to keep my seizures under control). My earlier point makes more sense under a public plan, instead of when it comes to profit-driven private insurance companies. I certainly can't see convincing (or forcing, really, given their lobbying power) private companies to stop the pre-existing condition nonsense without a guarantee of a larger customer pool, unfortunately.
I think our disagreement is on when and how much to compromise. If we start compromising at the start then we end up right where they want to be. If we refuse to compromise then we end up --- maybe where they want to be, but at least we've got a better chance than compromising from the get go.
I remember when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the white rulers offered him a two legislative body "compromise" one white and one black. He refused to compromise and what do you know he got a real democracy.
Oh yea, one other thing. In Ohio if an automobile insurer won't touch you then you end up with an SR-22 bond. Sucky coverage and expensive.
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