Re:Affordable Care
by smacktoward on Friday January 13, 2017 @04:06PM
(#13394716)
> I had childhood cancer and at the time it'd have costs millions without insurance.
This is the entire theoretical reason for insurance: to spread costs out across a large group, so that by having everyone pay a little nobody has to pay a lot.
It's also why the logic of modern healthcare makes single-payer systems the ones that work the best; they spread the costs across the widest possible "risk pool." And why the ACA had to include a (deeply unpopular) mandate that everybody buy some form of health insurance -- as long as your system is based on private insurance, such a mandate is the only way to get the young and healthy into that pool.
> It may actually be reasonable that budgeting $5k/person/year for healthcare is sane in terms of both risk and what you get, but just far more than people are used to thinking about or seems intuitively reasonable.
Remember that most Americans' income has been stagnant in real terms for nearly 40 years now, while health care costs have done nothing but increase and seem set to keep on doing so. So, barring some major change in how the economy works, whatever figure you set for "a reasonable amount to save for health care" is only going to seem less and less reasonable as it grows to consume a greater and greater share of those stagnant incomes.
In other words, if peoples' wages increased by $5K a year at the same time as they were expected to bear $5K a year of health care costs, it'd feel a lot less painful than just expecting them to pull that $5K out of the couch cushions.
This is the entire theoretical reason for insurance: to spread costs out across a large group, so that by having everyone pay a little nobody has to pay a lot.
It's also why the logic of modern healthcare makes single-payer systems the ones that work the best; they spread the costs across the widest possible "risk pool." And why the ACA had to include a (deeply unpopular) mandate that everybody buy some form of health insurance -- as long as your system is based on private insurance, such a mandate is the only way to get the young and healthy into that pool.
> It may actually be reasonable that budgeting $5k/person/year for healthcare is sane in terms of both risk and what you get, but just far more than people are used to thinking about or seems intuitively reasonable.
Remember that most Americans' income has been stagnant in real terms for nearly 40 years now, while health care costs have done nothing but increase and seem set to keep on doing so. So, barring some major change in how the economy works, whatever figure you set for "a reasonable amount to save for health care" is only going to seem less and less reasonable as it grows to consume a greater and greater share of those stagnant incomes.
In other words, if peoples' wages increased by $5K a year at the same time as they were expected to bear $5K a year of health care costs, it'd feel a lot less painful than just expecting them to pull that $5K out of the couch cushions.