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| The things I find myself doing at 4am thanks to a sick dog. by Mischief Maker 05/22/2017, 2:22am PDT | ||||
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| The details of healthcare is complex, but the concept is straightforward.
All insurance is about spreading out the risk. Everyone pays a little into an insurance system, the few with bad luck have their astronomical costs covered by the aggregate payments of many with decent luck. The job of either insurance companies in the US or the government in single payer nations is the bookkeeping involved. Private health insurance is inherently flawed because these companies have the profit motives to 1: maximize payments coming in from their customers, and 2: minimize payments going out for treatment. This whole "pre-existing condition" nonsense was one of the most egregious of the bullshit excuses used by insurance companies pre-ACA to deny coverage to customers who'd been making payments in good faith for years. The ACA, aka. Obamacare was a right-wing plan thought up by the Heritage Foundation to preserve the parasitic health insurance companies while addressing some of the most indefensible practices in order to stave off the push for Single-Payer. The biggest flaw of Obamacare is it doesn't have any price controls on the insurance companies, either directly by rules, or indirectly by offering competition from a public option. Paul Ryan is either a lying sack of shit or a complete moron when he says you can take the individual mandate out of Obamacare. Like I said before, insurance FUNCTIONS on low-risk people paying for insurance so their aggregate payments can pay for the immediate needs of high-risk people. And everyone becomes high-risk eventually. We already have single payer in the US, it's called Medicare. Going to a single payer system would involve extending medicare to all ages. People would pay more in taxes, but eliminate their health insurance payments at the same time. And divorced from the profit motive to fuck over customers, government-managed insurance is cheaper in other countries. |
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