Public Fried Chicken (by Scott Banister)

Re:Public Fried Chicken (by Scott Banister) by ubernostrum on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @11:22PM (#1000413)

Well, in theory this is how insurance is supposed to work, and is how it works in other fields. The general idea of insurance is risk management: I have a huge unpredictable risk which worries me, so I transform it into a small, predictable risk by purchasing insurance.

And, true to form, with other types of insurance I pay "routine" types of costs myself; for example, I have auto insurance, but I don't expect it to pay for a tank of gas or an oil change. I pay those myself, and have the insurance available for things like accidents, which are unpredictable and far too expensive for me to pay for all in one go.

And yet... health insurance tends overwhelmingly to pay for predictable routine treatments (yearly checkups, for example) while balking at paying for precisely the sorts of large unpredictable costs it's meant to help manage. How'd we end up with that system?

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Re:Public Fried Chicken (by Scott Banister) by stevenbedrick on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @11:40PM (#1000426)

Well, first of all, many health insurance plans don't cover routine care (annual physicals, etc.).

Second of all, those plans that do cover routine care generally do so under the theory that, by paying a small amount of money for routine care, they're avoiding paying much more down the road when the cheap problems that would have been caught at a routine physical turn into big, expensive problems.

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Re:Public Fried Chicken (by Scott Banister) by ubernostrum on Thursday December 17, 2009 @02:40AM (#1000622)

Increasingly, health insurance plans cover routine care under the banner of "wellness" (there's a reason why there are specialized procedure codes to identify them). Unfortunately, they often take the form of "sure, we'll cover that prostate screening, but if it turns out you actually have cancer, um, tough luck."

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