Insurance needs to be solvent to run, maybe not “profitable” but solvent.
By Daniel at 25 June, 2009, 7:49 pm
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How does this work?
Car insurance
1.0 Pay more than you use = insurance company profit.
2.0 You fix a car with insurance if it has useful life left (fix cheaper than scrap).
3.0 You don’t if it doesn’t or is too damaged to fix compared to its worth.
4.0 Not everyone even uses insurance on their car, but retires it after it is used up.
So, overall, more goes in than out, or you could rig it so it is a zero sum game (the feds would screw that option up, by the way) but the overall system works on an item like a car.
No we look at health care.
1.0 Medicaid already pays for a considerable portion of “welfare” healthcare. No money coming in there.
2.0 The new “plan” is to put EVERYONE else on health care.
3.0 Americans spend over 2/3 of their TOTAL healthcare costs in the last five years (or less) of life, which EXCEEDS what was paid in. My father had 2 million spend on needless operations while he was dying of Alzheimer’s as an example.
4.0 If we are ALL are guaranteed health care to the end of our natural lives, and we put in less than we take out, where is the money coming from?
5.0 No one wants to put a value on “life” or a medical “procedure” that we emotionally connect with life, so it naturally goes up, up and up in value to show that we are “human” and have “compassion”.
6.0 Our humanness makes the concept of “insurance” seem mighty improbable to EVER be a zero sum game with everyone signed-up…UNLESS we define what a procedure really costs (is a band-aide really 30 bucks, a simple broken arm $100,000) and limit what is reasonable end-of life expenses.
I have a living will to PREVENT such costly atrocities as what my Dad went through. AFTER he was mentally compromised, he had hip replacement, and an aortic aneurism operation followed with endless “therapy” which he was told to do every day. He didn’t remember. A young, viable person is truly more deserving than my father at his end of life situation. But, the only valve to stop the madness was decisions made by people too close to Dad to see the right things. We’re human, too. My living will and trust is hopefully humane, but remains none human. We need something like this in order to solve our problem. It won’t be easy.
Rower
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