Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ersatzredux]

Having people pay out of pocket for "minor" healthcare treatments and reserving insurance for catastrophic events is an idiotic system designed to guarantee more catastrophic events. It is a perfect example of false savings.

Let's just give an example. Joe Sixpack gets a nagging cough that doesn't go away. He considers going to his doctor to check it out, but then decides to postpone it. "It'll cost me $80.00, maybe more, and probably there's nothing wrong with me. I need that money to pay VISA this month anyway." So he doesn't go until it gets really bad, when he finds out that he has a cancer that, because he did not detect it early and have it treated, has now spread through his body. So he gets put on a regime of heavy chemo, is hospitalized for months, and dies anyway. The insurance plan picks up the bill. How much do you think would have been saved if Joe hadn't had an economic disincentive against visiting his doctor?

The thing about healthcare is that a great many chronic and horribly expensive conditions can be nipped in the bud and treated cheaply if they are detected early. The last thing you want is to have an incentive for people to avoid going to the doctor unless they absolutely have to- or in other words, when its too late. This guarantees not only needless suffering and death, but that your "catastrophe" insurance will cost a hell of a lot more than it has to.

As for the Canadian single payer system, Americans should really check out the facts for themselves rather than listening to propaganda from the private health insurance industry and their hired spokespeople, who have
every incentive in the world to distort the true situation. Studies by Aetna commissioned by the Alberta government to justify their own attempts to privatize healthcare ended up doing the opposite. It showed, without a shadow of a doubt, that a single payer system with universal coverage was far more efficient than a private multiple payer system.

Problems, and they do exist, come from years of underfunding, not the model itself. Just the same though, Canadians have much better overall health outcomes than Americans do, at around 2/3 the cost. And no one ever has to suffer and die because they "had a pre-existing condition" or "exceeded policy limits", or their insurance company found some pretext to cancel coverage or not offer renewal. Don't let ideology and the interests of the few get in the way of having the kind of security that the great majority of the Western world takes for granted.

[Street Magic]

[mises]

[ersatzredux]

it is true that good old human procrastination plays a role even when healthcare is free, but when you tack on user fees or make people pay directly out of pocket (as mises suggests) than it only adds weight to the "wait and see" attitude people have. Spread that disincentive among billions of individual decisions and adding more weight to the procrastination side is going to have a cumulatively large effect. We don't normally impose fines to encourage people to do things, do we? Rather it is the reverse.

Mises,

All of the problems I listed at the end with private health insurance coverage are a direct result of the system, and indeed, it couldn't operate without them. Insurance is all about maximizing premium and minimizing claims- that's how you make money at it. When you have a fragmented market where insurance companies competitively select the risks they are going to take on, they will avoid clients who are high risk as much as they can and in any way they can. When you have universal coverage where no one can be selected against than this incentive no longer operates. Period.