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INSURANCE is what is driving up the costs wildly. Stop trying to insure people, start moving them into a position of control and empowerment over what they do.
THE ANSWER lies in removing insurance ENTIRELY as an employer paid benefit, letting the individual purchase their own, NOT mandating what insurance covers, but letting the individual choose what and how he wants to be insured. Let the free market and competition (what insurance and government control remove) for service and price do what can be done. Nothing else works. Ever.
Bwahahaha. Insurance has nothing to do with the cost of healthcare. Similarly, insurance has nothing to do with the cost of replacement car parts, the cost of rent, or the cost of a house. 2/3 of the increase in healthcare prices is related to affluence and technology, cartel like monopolies also have a role in jacking up the prices, having a hospital model instead of a clinic based model also contributes to higher prices, but insurance? Lol, there is no proof insurance companies drive up prices. I can get unlimited insurance coverage for 90 pounds in the UK and similar coverage in Ireland as well.
Free markets lower the actual costs of goods and services. So, free markets HELP the poor, not hurt them.
That's a rather naive oversimplification of economics. The more refined answer is that it depends on the kind of market. For certain types of goods and services, such as large infrastructure, free markets don't work and may in fact encourage monopolistic behavior. Utilities before the digital age are the classic historical example covered in every economics textbooks; just now they are starting to become cracked open by technology to the point where competition produces the market reactions you're thinking of. Healthcare is a market where the nature of expense is such that you can't possibly afford it on your own; also, you don't exactly have time to go price / feature shopping when you need emergency heart surgery. So you can't just blithely say it's the same as when you go buy a Mr. Coffee machine at the store.
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Originally Posted by pnwmdk
Why would anyone buy insurance that doesn't help you? Don't buy crappy insurance, save your money and PAY YOUR OWN BILLS.
Do you think you're entitled to lung transplants and heart surgery, just because you want it?
Obviously, if lower-income people could afford better insurance, they would buy the better insurance, right....
But let me ask you this, if you feel that people should not feel "entitled" to healthcare in a first-world nation such as America:
If you or one of your family members had a heart attack tomorrow, would you or one of your family members first check to see if you have the money for it and then call 9-11 for emergency car?
And if you didn't have the money, would you agree to just sit there and quietly die so as not to burden society with your expense?
Folks who prefer to have policies that bar coverage for pre-existing conditions should have that right.
Maybe neither they nor their families have or plan to have any pre-existing medical problems. And if they do have any such conditions, they've got plenty of money to pay for it themselves.
INSURANCE is what is driving up the costs wildly. Stop trying to insure people, start moving them into a position of control and empowerment over what they do.
THE ANSWER lies in removing insurance ENTIRELY as an employer paid benefit, letting the individual purchase their own, NOT mandating what insurance covers, but letting the individual choose what and how he wants to be insured. Let the free market and competition (what insurance and government control remove) for service and price do what can be done. Nothing else works. Ever.
Wasn't that something that McCain proposed and if you look at the Ryan Plan and even the ACA you are looking at something like that. How many Medicare recipients are going to want to jump into the free market? 60% of them voted Republican in 2010 because they liked their Medicare when Republicans ran to the left of Obama.
Again, that doesn't work. YOU can't even pay for the healthcare you need. Got an extra $100K lying around in case you need emergency heart surgery tomorrow? I doubt it. If you're lucky, you can afford an insurance premium that puts you in a pool with other insurance holders and lets you basically use their premiums to cover your costs when you're sick. That's what insurance is.
The bolded part is 100% false.
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And again...when the person who can't afford the insurance needs urgent care, do you think we live in a nation where they turn them away at the ER door and say, "no, go die in the street?" That's not how this works. You'll STILL be paying for them in terms of higher premiums.
So, your "solution" is to say "be poor, and you'll be given everything you want... Work hard and we'll rob you to give the poor person everything..."
THE ANSWER lies in removing insurance ENTIRELY as an employer paid benefit, letting the individual purchase their own, NOT mandating what insurance covers, but letting the individual choose what and how he wants to be insured. Let the free market and competition (what insurance and government control remove) for service and price do what can be done. Nothing else works. Ever.
Then you'll still have millions of people who can't buy insurance at any price because they have pre-existing conditions. In fact, you'll have millions MORE people who will have been thrown off their insurance because they're sick (which is currently illegal, damn that medding government!).
What are they supposed to do, if they can't afford to buy out-of-pocket the health care or medicine they need to stay alive?
Wasn't that something that McCain proposed and if you look at the Ryan Plan and even the ACA you are looking at something like that. How many Medicare recipients are going to want to jump into the free market? 60% of them voted Republican in 2010 because they liked their Medicare when Republicans ran to the left of Obama.
The medical horror stories rarely involve too little care. Mostly they involve too much care.
Right now we have a system where it's impossible to find out the actual price of a hospital procedure before it's done. And where the price varies by the insurance company.
But no one talks about fixing that. And it would be easy to fix.
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