Re:G.M. Strike: 50k Union Workers Walk Out Over Wages and Id...
by pdonis on Monday September 16, 2019 @12:32PM
(#20985802)
> We'd all be better off if we lived in a world where cars and widgets and clothes cost twice as much, but healthcare half as much.
No, we wouldn't, because people buy cars and clothes more often than they buy health care.
What costs a lot in the US is health insurance, not health care. And that's because the thing called health "insurance" isn't actually insurance; it's not just covering you against unforeseen large expenses. It's more like an expensive maintenance plan that you're forced to buy whether it's cost effective to you or not--like the full service maintenance plans that car dealers try to sell you, except that you can refuse to buy them from car dealers.
What really needs to happen is to separate out three very different things that are lumped together today into what is misleadingly called "health insurance":
(1) Routine, predictable maintenance expenses, like regular physical exams and vaccinations, and routine care for common illnesses like the flu. These should be provided by a competitive free market, like they were in the US before WW II when employers started offering health benefits to attract workers since wartime regulations prohibited them from offering higher wages. Competition would drive these costs down since the expenses are routine and it's reasonably easy for people to tell good providers from bad ones.
(2) Unforeseen, large, temporary expenses, like accidents. These are what would normally be covered by something properly called "insurance". For auto accidents, people's auto insurance is already required to cover them in most states; but for other kinds of accidents--slips and falls, broken bones while playing sports, etc.--an ordinary insurance model would be suitable, provided by health insurance companies.
(3) Expensive chronic conditions that require ongoing treatment (usually drugs, but not always). These are the hard ones to cover, but a system that was dedicated to covering them and nothing else would be much better than the bastardized system we have now that lumps everything together. These are the kinds of things where it makes sense to pool national resources and provide some kind of universal coverage, since it's usually not feasible to assign specific causes so an ordinary insurance model can't work. But if national resources were pooled to provide universal coverage for just these things, we could see how much they actually cost and we would be more focused on finding ways to reduce the frequency of such conditions.
> You can find such a model on the other side of the pond.
Really? Cars and clothes are twice as expensive as in the US?
No, we wouldn't, because people buy cars and clothes more often than they buy health care.
What costs a lot in the US is health insurance, not health care. And that's because the thing called health "insurance" isn't actually insurance; it's not just covering you against unforeseen large expenses. It's more like an expensive maintenance plan that you're forced to buy whether it's cost effective to you or not--like the full service maintenance plans that car dealers try to sell you, except that you can refuse to buy them from car dealers.
What really needs to happen is to separate out three very different things that are lumped together today into what is misleadingly called "health insurance":
(1) Routine, predictable maintenance expenses, like regular physical exams and vaccinations, and routine care for common illnesses like the flu. These should be provided by a competitive free market, like they were in the US before WW II when employers started offering health benefits to attract workers since wartime regulations prohibited them from offering higher wages. Competition would drive these costs down since the expenses are routine and it's reasonably easy for people to tell good providers from bad ones.
(2) Unforeseen, large, temporary expenses, like accidents. These are what would normally be covered by something properly called "insurance". For auto accidents, people's auto insurance is already required to cover them in most states; but for other kinds of accidents--slips and falls, broken bones while playing sports, etc.--an ordinary insurance model would be suitable, provided by health insurance companies.
(3) Expensive chronic conditions that require ongoing treatment (usually drugs, but not always). These are the hard ones to cover, but a system that was dedicated to covering them and nothing else would be much better than the bastardized system we have now that lumps everything together. These are the kinds of things where it makes sense to pool national resources and provide some kind of universal coverage, since it's usually not feasible to assign specific causes so an ordinary insurance model can't work. But if national resources were pooled to provide universal coverage for just these things, we could see how much they actually cost and we would be more focused on finding ways to reduce the frequency of such conditions.
> You can find such a model on the other side of the pond.
Really? Cars and clothes are twice as expensive as in the US?