The insurance business is the business of distributing risk. In the case of the patient, you buy insurance because there is a risk to injury or illness. That risk is obviously personal (as in your body) until you get treated, then financial when you have to pay for it. There is also risk for the insurer. If there wasn't some risk for being an insurer, you wouldn't have to pay a company to cover you. Their goal is to have enough healthy people in the mix who are paying and not getting sick to cover the people who do get sick, and make just enough more to have a profit. Insurance companies, just like casinos, hope that the statistics are just good enough in their favor that they can afford to make a gamble and win most of the time. In the case of Lance, the insurance companied gambled and lost. But, that doesn't mean they wouldn't dream of insuring a million other people like him because they know statistically he's a safer bet. The economic argument that Matt is suggesting does not fail simply because an insurance company lost money on one patient one time.
Assuming that you put the need for healthcare on the same level as the need for a car, you should pay because it's pretty unavoidable that you will need a car some day.
That's something that ocurred to me from reading the blog/discussion site I gave details of. Quite a few people on there said how horrendous the health insurance companies were to deal with and how complicated it all was. Over here you just go to the doctor and he treats you. There's no forms to fill in... you just provide your name and address for him to check your medical records. I suppose it comes down to the fact that it's cheaper to simply treat you than to have an army of accountants, lawyers and clerks checking whether you're entitled to treatment. By the time they've screwed around they could have already made you well.
Er, isn't it more to the point that the need for a car and the need to be kept alive are fundamentally different? You don't need one but you sure as sh%t need the other.
I was being sarcastic Andy. How on earth someone can compare the need for a car to the need for healthcare is beyond me.
This is said both facetiously and seriously at the same time: What makes you think the federal government gives a rat's ass about providing quality health care to people like you?
Interesting. I'm not suggesting you should adopt the British model by any means but we have what are called Strategic Health Authorities whose management is made up of professional managers and local people including business leaders, social workers, local council politicians, etc., obviously in collaboration with health care professionals By this method local people have a direct influencing on how the money is spent and how health care is provided. http://www.nhs.uk/england/authoritiesTrusts/default.cmsx There's absolutely no question that the people receiving the health care have to have some say in how it's done. My understanding is that the SHA sets a budget based on how much money central government says it can spend but that it is largely up to them to make it work. However, there are also central operations like NHS direct which offers health advice by phone to anyone that calls it free of charge including which ailments can be safely treated yourself and which should be treated by a doctor, A&E, etc.