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Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

nytimes.com

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Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#371

Post by jasonwocky »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #351
danssig wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please cite somewhere in the world where the free market is working for health care? Every other first world country either has socialized medicine or a tightly regulated health industry.

Singapore - arguably the most efficient healthcare system in the world. Tim Harford talks about it in his excellent book "The Undercover Economist" (worth commenting that he's not rampantly free market - he spends time putting the boot into the US system too as well as praising the UK's NHS). Basically everyone has to maintain a fund (the government pay into it for the poorest) for healthcare. This is what they spend…

Basically everyone has to maintain a fund...

And with that, you're no longer in a free market.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#372

Post by stcredzero »

cookiecaper wrote: post #355
potatolicious wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Break a leg? Probably not a big deal. Get cancer? Better look out." This is a horrifying, inhumane, uncivilized concept. Why the American public simply accepts this is mind-boggling.

We obviously don't accept it, people have been trying to change it and it's been a major election issue for several years now. There's just a lot wrong about health care, so there are lots of facets for people to latch onto and say, "We have to fix this part!", and then the people who want to fix another part spend a few years bickering about which part is the key to fixing the whole thing (no part individually, but…

Also, people do not evaluate things independently and rely on pundits like Glenn Beck or Rachel Maddow to evaluate the situation and give them an opinion.

This applies as well to pundits on other regions of the political spectrum. Are so many of us really so hollow now? (Unfortunately, the market says: yes.)

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#373

Post by thinkingeric »

Something to add to the discussion: She says "my recent M.R.I. cost $1,300 at the “retail” rate, while the rate negotiated by the insurance company was $700."

I have insurance and the insurance company (BCBS) will only pay what it thinks is appropriate for a service, not some negotiated rate. That is, if the doctor, hospital, or lab says that it costs $1,300, but the insurance company wants to pay $700, I'm stuck for the other $600. The result is that in order to meet the high deductible (at which point I no longer have to pay out of pocket like this), I pay way beyond the amount of the deductible since only the approved rates are applied. In practice, I end up paying out 175% or more of the deductible amount.

I suspect that our experience will soon become the norm, if its not already.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#374

Post by thinkingeric »

thinkingeric wrote: post #373

Something to add to the discussion: She says "my recent M.R.I. cost $1,300 at the “retail” rate, while the rate negotiated by the insurance company was $700." I have insurance and the insurance company (BCBS) will only pay what it thinks is appropriate for a service, not some negotiated rate. That is, if the doctor, hospital, or lab says that it costs $1,300, but the insurance company wants to pay $700, I'm stuck for…

Also, this is of course over and above what my company pays in premiums. Altogether it is a significant amount of money for a family of four that has no major medical problems. For a small business, the overall burden is problematic.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#375

Post by thinkingeric »

klenwell wrote: post #255
ajays wrote: post #138

The irony is: the same Congresscritters who vote against universal health insurance get top-notch health insurance paid for by taxpayers: http://www.suite101.com/content/health-care-for-the-us-congr... After 5 years of service, they get lifetime health insurance, the same as all federal employees and retirees: http://www.opm.gov/insure/retirees/index.asp?MainQuestionId=...

A few tea partiers turned down the insurance this year on principle. One was interviewed on NPR, where he acknowledged that the insurance rates he found on the open marker were a bit of a shock: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/09/133629806/16-Freshmen-GOP-Decl... Still, he rationalizes away the benefits of the new Health Care law: "But I think that if we had true health care reform that I wouldn't be paying $1,300 a month…

Yeah, I caught the 'tort reform' misdirection as well. Also, I think earns north of $170,000 a year, which made his turning down the insurance 'on principle' a bit ridiculous.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#376

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

jasonwocky wrote: post #371
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singapore - arguably the most efficient healthcare system in the world. Tim Harford talks about it in his excellent book "The Undercover Economist" (worth commenting that he's not rampantly free market - he spends time putting the boot into the US system too as well as praising the UK's NHS). Basically everyone has to maintain a fund (the government pay into it for the poorest) for healthcare. This is what they spend…

Basically everyone has to maintain a fund... And with that, you're no longer in a free market.

If you want a definition that tight then I'm not sure that you'll find a first world country with a free market for healthcare, working or not.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#377

Post by api »

acabal wrote: post #2

This really highlights how utterly insane our system is. I'm living off of my own business, which means that I don't have an employer to cover me under group insurance. But I really only make enough to live frugally and save a tiny amount each month--to me, an affordable health insurance plan would be between $50-$100 a month. Fat chance of that happening. And if it did, the deductible would be so high as to make the…

What we have is everything that is bad about a private healthcare system combined with everything that is bad about socialized medicine.

Over-regulation, high cost, and impossible to get without an employer or some other kind of large group.

The American system benefits only one group: insurance companies.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#378

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

danssig wrote: post #333
maxharris wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few will admit that we don't have anything close to a free market in healthcare today (or for the past several decades). A truly free market is one unfettered by the FDA, medicare, medicaid, doctor regulations, hospital regulations, HMO regulations, insurance regulations, etc. All of these controls were ostensibly put in place to protect patients, but in actuality they serve to slow innovation and true access to medi…

For someone who puts so much faith in free markets you don't appear to understand how they work. In your studies, look up "market elasticity" for a clue.

The phrase "market elasticity" is meaningless.

Elasticity in economics describes the relationship between two variables (normally price and demand which is price elasticity [of demand] but by no means exclusively).

But unless you define your variables (or state what sort of elasticity) it's not a useful term and certainly not something I'd be bandying about while suggesting that someone else didn't have a clue.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#379

Post by tomlin »

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #110
Groxx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to me, an affordable health insurance plan would be between $50-$100 a month. Fat chance of that happening. And if it did, the deductible would be so high as to make the plan worthless for anything short of a car-crash-emergency-type-situation. This fits a fair number of cost complaints I hear over healthcare. Who wouldn't like to pay $50-100/month to have something better than emergency healthcare support? But thi…

Japan forces their doctors to charge only what's published in a book that the government issues and negotiates prices periodically. Simple price fixing in an otherwise private healthcare market. In return, Japanese doctors and hospitals (FYI, there are more private hospitals in Japan than the US) are allowed to set whatever prices for ancillary services (like private or semi-private rooms) that they want. BTW, the av…

What Tommy Douglas did was revolutionary, but Canada's healthcare system is no longer something to be proud of. We have some of the highest wait times for Cancer patients in the industrialized world, hurried appointments, cuts in coverage. I don't blame the government, I blame us Canadians. If you've seen the Micheal Moore movie, SICKO, you've seen the average Canadian's view on our system, which is, that it is truly great.

The government is getting a pat on the back for removing essential services because the masses aren't taking notice; we've fanboy-ed our system while ignoring its degradation of the fundamentals. Our current system is not a positive guideline to success.

A Macleans article about the state of our system: http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/01/25/our-health-care-delusion/

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#380

Post by damoncali »

speleding wrote: post #325
damoncali wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people don't like to admit is that free markets don't work for healthcare. What is the price you're willing to pay for curing that tumor in your gut? Everything you have. There is no supply vs. demand. Only supply vs infinity. What would happen to the food market were it not for the generally high supply of food? It wouldn't be pretty. Because of that, some sort of non-market intervention is simply unavoidable.…

> free markets don't work for healthcare Healthcare can be broken up into a lot of smaller markets, and for a lot of those the free market works just fine. The market for coffee in the cafeteria of the hospital works fine as a free market. Do you know what percentage of healthcare cost pertain to the cost of the actual treatment itself? (hint: it's a very small part)

Good point. I over-simplified. There are many causes to the current state of the healthcare market, only one of which is the problem I described.
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