This is my favorite cockamamie argument against universal insurance.
The same people who hate paying taxes have no problem paying for the uninsured, instead of forcing EVERYONE to buy insurance.
We don’t deny medical care to ANYONE in this country, regardless of insurance coverage.
Why not make sure EVERYONE is already covered so YOU don’t have to pay for someone else’s irresponsibility?
Why not mandate that everyone purchase a product that’s:
- twice as expensive as it should be and rising 150% every 10 years
- misaligned with your desire to be healthy
- painfully inadequate providing you with a convenient experience
- exempt from antitrust regulations
- etc…
Soup…how much of our nation’s healthcare costs are due to the uninsured taking advantage of the system that doesn’t deny them? Very little. 75% of healthcare costs in America come from insured chronic illness. 25% of healthcare costs come from acute illnesses. Our current system is set up to purchase as much possible care for as much possible chronic illness. Until that bottomless money pit business model is changed, I cannot support a mandate that will bankrupt the average person and the average small business.
It truly doesn’t matter anyway. In just about 5 years, only the wealthy companies and individuals will be able to afford traditional insurance the government mandates. It’s not in the insurance industry’s profitable interest to offer low cost, high-deductible plans. I haven’t seen any regulations out there mandating that insurance companies must offer a certain percentage of affordable high deductible plans.
Are they mandating affordability for the average person? Or are they mandating a bailout of a completely unsustainable business. Imagine a bailout of the automobile industry but multiply that by 1000 every year.
The best solutions are always the simplest. Here’s what we do:
- Everyone buys their own insurance just like every other form of insurance out there
- The tax code gets amended so individuals can write off healthcare expenses (everything, not just health insurance expenses but stuff like prescriptions, so-called “alternative” treatements, etc)
- The individual pays the care provider directly at the time of the visit just like you pay Apple in the store when you buy an iPhone
I’d be interested to see what percentage of the rise in healthcare costs is attributable to the actual rise in cost of the procedure? You would think the trend would be going the other direction, as most products tend to get cheaper over time as production of the product is streamlined and more efficiencies are discovered. This race to the bottom is of course strengthened by the fact that other companies are competing to offer a better product to the same customer, providing a greater incentive to continue lowering price OR improve performance at the same price.
So why are all the trends in healthcare going in the opposite direction? I can understand the aggregate costs going up due to population demographics related to the baby boom generation, but on a per unit basis (or per patient in this case), costs ought to be going down. So why aren’t they?
My suspicion (and it’s an uninformed one) is that the massive bureaucracy that health insurance companies have established is a leading cost center responsible for a good percentage of the increase. Couple that with the bureaucracy the medical providers have established to interact with the one the insurance companies have and the result is a lot of bloat and unnecessary expense.
Surely this can’t all be related to doctors practicing defensive medicine can it?
Jay can speak to this much more intelligently than I can, but I believe the reason costs are going up so quickly is because the person ordering and receiving medical services (You) is different than the organization paying for those services (Insurance). Therefore, you don’t care and don’t know how much stuff costs and, in the interests of making sure you’ve got every inspected and covered, you’ll order every test in the book. Better safe than sorry, right? As a result, you’re racking up one hell of a bill, and although you don’t pay the bill now, you’re paying it later in the form of higher premiums.
