Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite • Hacker News Board

Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

#201

Post by javert » Sun, Sep 02, 2012, 5:54 PM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #196

javert wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect the continued growth of socialized medicine to continue the trend of less and less competence among medical professionals, and less and less medical professionals period (particularly doctors--which seem to be in acute shortage already). So, nothing will change overnight, but this certainly isn't going to allow things to get _better_, which would eventually happen in a more free-market medical system. Americ…

"Medicine could, and should, be a lot like going to the vet." Yeah, and patients whose cures are more expensive than they can afford should be put down painlessly, eh? There are some aspects of health care where free market mechanisms can improve efficiency, but efficiency is not by itself the ultimate goal a health care system should have.

How much does it cost to treat a dog for the most serious medical problems, like cancer? I bet it's trivial compared to the cost of a human. I bet it's so little, that we could actually think about treating everyone for everything, if we could get human treatment to that level of efficiency.

Seriously, it's the most humane way to go.

In the meantime, I'll be thinking about going to India if I or loved ones need serious medical care.

Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

#202

Post by idiot » Sun, Sep 02, 2012, 6:08 PM UTC

clarky07 wrote: post #187

rdtsc wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is gambling with citizens health and encouraging predatory and extortionist behavior by hospitals and insurance conglomerates on people who are sick and vulnerable an obvious states issue, while stuff like 'right to have guns in your house' is a federal law.

Well, because the latter was specifically in the constitution, and is key to our ability to protect ourselves from tyranny. The former was not in the constitution. If you don't like it you can feel free to amend the constitution. It's been done, and it will be done again.

Is there a way I can use a gun to protect myself from "health care" tyranny (other than shooting myself in the head)?

Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

#203

Post by petercooper » Sun, Sep 02, 2012, 7:36 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #177

petercooper wrote: post #47

Naïve European who'd pay nothing for this here (ok, taxes, but supposedly we still pay fewer % of our GDP overall) with a question: I’ll have to have to pay less than 6% of that, because I’m lucky enough to still have insurance. Why? If you have insurance, shouldn't that cover the whole expense? Or is it a bit like an excess on a car insurance policy? Can you get insurance that covers everything?

Did you ever have car insurance or any other kind of insurance? Most insurances have deductibles, and the point of that is that insurance is to prevent catastrophic loss, not every expense. There can be insurance that covers 100% of expenses, but it will be very expensive, especially for health, as it won't be insurance at all. Imagine that 1000 people pay each $100 into insurance pool. Then if somebody has a problem…

Did you ever have car insurance or any other kind of insurance?

Yes. I go with the largest excess possible (what I assume is also called a deductible) because the chance of making a claim is low. But it's only 10-20% more to have no excess at all.

The logic in your second paragraph makes sense on the surface, but the lack of a deductible in many European-style health systems doesn't seem to result in a larger share of GDP being spent on health (which is notoriously high in the US) or the healthcare being of a lower quality.

Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

#204

Post by brazzy » Sun, Sep 02, 2012, 9:38 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #199

brazzy wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the point of insurance is not to buy into or share the risk of others Yes, that is exactly the point of insurance. Everything you wrote is wrong, sorry.

The model where there are many clients and one policy is the norm, but that doesn't mean the system requires it. If insurers went to the trouble of making it work, you could have individual policies written up for each and every client, and sell the risk to subscribers (as is done with mortgages). Example: http://voices.yahoo.com/bizarre-insurance-policies-famous-ce... A quote: "America Ferrera is the newest addition…

You're right, my statement was too broad, but I submit that it is still correct for health insurance, when the goal is (I hope) to get affordable health care for everyone. The difference is that if vehicle insurance for your tank is unobtainable to prohibitively expensive, you can choose not to drive that tank. You have no choice in getting type 1 diabetes, or appendicitis, or an MRSA-infected bug bite.

Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

#205

Post by lutusp » Sun, Sep 02, 2012, 10:34 PM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #204

lutusp wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model where there are many clients and one policy is the norm, but that doesn't mean the system requires it. If insurers went to the trouble of making it work, you could have individual policies written up for each and every client, and sell the risk to subscribers (as is done with mortgages). Example: http://voices.yahoo.com/bizarre-insurance-policies-famous-ce... A quote: "America Ferrera is the newest addition…

You're right, my statement was too broad, but I submit that it is still correct for health insurance, when the goal is (I hope) to get affordable health care for everyone. The difference is that if vehicle insurance for your tank is unobtainable to prohibitively expensive, you can choose not to drive that tank. You have no choice in getting type 1 diabetes, or appendicitis, or an MRSA-infected bug bite.

> You're right, my statement was too broad, but I submit that it is still correct for health insurance ...

It's correct because the present system is set up that way. But this doesn't mean it must be that way, or that insurance requires a large pool of clients with the same policy and coverage. That's a coincidence.

From the standpoint of a large publicly-held corporation, many clients with identical policies, or many clients each with unique personal policies, work internally exactly the same way -- it's all about actuaries assessing risk and setting rates.

> I submit that it is still correct for health insurance, when the goal is (I hope) to get affordable health care for everyone.

Regardless of the business model, if health costs cannot be controlled, insurers will refuse to write the policies. This outcome doesn't depend on the assumptions behind the program -- whether there is a large program with many identically covered clients, or a program in which each client has a unique policy and the capital pool is the corporation's stockholders rather than the policy holders.

In both cases, some circumstances are unworkable. It remains to be seen whether health costs can be meaningfully regulated, in order to make a mandatory health insurance requirement politically acceptable. I sincerely hope so, but I don't control health care costs.

Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

#206

Post by rdtsc » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 2:15 AM UTC

idiot wrote: post #202

clarky07 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, because the latter was specifically in the constitution, and is key to our ability to protect ourselves from tyranny. The former was not in the constitution. If you don't like it you can feel free to amend the constitution. It's been done, and it will be done again.

Is there a way I can use a gun to protect myself from "health care" tyranny (other than shooting myself in the head)?

Funny, I actually made that point once (when I was feeling particularly sarcastic). It was rather derogatory and went something like this "Hmm interesting... all these people in West Virginia seem to hate voting for better healthcare and love voting to get more guns, so maybe their answer to healthcare problem is rational after all and it is to just put those guns to good use".

Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

#207

Post by brazzy » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 8:04 AM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #205

brazzy wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, my statement was too broad, but I submit that it is still correct for health insurance, when the goal is (I hope) to get affordable health care for everyone. The difference is that if vehicle insurance for your tank is unobtainable to prohibitively expensive, you can choose not to drive that tank. You have no choice in getting type 1 diabetes, or appendicitis, or an MRSA-infected bug bite.

> You're right, my statement was too broad, but I submit that it is still correct for health insurance ... It's correct because the present system is set up that way. But this doesn't mean it must be that way, or that insurance requires a large pool of clients with the same policy and coverage. That's a coincidence. From the standpoint of a large publicly-held corporation, many clients with identical policies, or man…

> It's correct because the present system is set up that way. But this doesn't mean it must be that way, or that insurance requires a large pool of clients with the same policy and coverage. That's a coincidence.

No, it is not.

> From the standpoint of a large publicly-held corporation, many clients with identical policies, or many clients each with unique personal policies, work internally exactly the same way -- it's all about actuaries assessing risk and setting rates.

The economy exists to serve people, not the other way round. The only acceptable system is one that allows people with chronic illnesses to get coverage like everyone else, and for an affordable price. The only effective way to prevent commercial insurers to refuse coverage to such people is to not allow them to issue personal policies.

Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

#208

Post by bane » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 6:33 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #171

TheAmazingIdiot wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery is not an enumerated right, to control or to tax, for federal powers listed in the Constitution. Therefore it should fall to the states, or their respective citizens. A war was fought over this very issue. States lost. Get over it. Functionally, Massachusetts Health Care Insurance Reform Law is similar to Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. One is state law, and the other one federal law. Questions we…

> Slavery is not an enumerated right, to control or to tax, for federal powers listed in the Constitution. So? It is not in a paper composed 200+ years ago that we somehow feel the need to worship and treat it like a set of magic tablets given to Moses on a mountain or something. Aren't the citizens supposed to be able to change and update that as they see fit, isn't that even more in the spirit of Founding Fathers t…

Don't get too caught up in it. Fights over Constitutionally "enumerated" rights are simply code words for ignoring the 9th amendment. i.e. the framers of the Constitution knew that they could not possibly enumerate all rights from the get go and were bound to make mistakes (especially since most of the rights they were enumerating had not been traditionally recognized before).

The Framers did not intend that the first eight amendments be construed to exhaust the basic and fundamental rights.... I do not mean to imply that the .... Ninth Amendment constitutes an independent source of rights protected from infringement by either the States or the Federal Government....While the Ninth Amendment - and indeed the entire Bill of Rights - originally concerned restrictions upon federal power, the subsequently enacted Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the States as well from abridging fundamental personal liberties. And, the Ninth Amendment, in indicating that not all such liberties are specifically mentioned in the first eight amendments, is surely relevant in showing the existence of other fundamental personal rights, now protected from state, as well as federal, infringement. In sum, the Ninth Amendment simply lends strong support to the view that the "liberty" protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments from infringement by the Federal Government or the States is not restricted to rights specifically mentioned in the first eight amendments. Cf. United Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75, 94-95. - Justice Arthur Goldberg

Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

#209

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 6:35 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #171

TheAmazingIdiot wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery is not an enumerated right, to control or to tax, for federal powers listed in the Constitution. Therefore it should fall to the states, or their respective citizens. A war was fought over this very issue. States lost. Get over it. Functionally, Massachusetts Health Care Insurance Reform Law is similar to Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. One is state law, and the other one federal law. Questions we…

> Slavery is not an enumerated right, to control or to tax, for federal powers listed in the Constitution. So? It is not in a paper composed 200+ years ago that we somehow feel the need to worship and treat it like a set of magic tablets given to Moses on a mountain or something. Aren't the citizens supposed to be able to change and update that as they see fit, isn't that even more in the spirit of Founding Fathers t…

[deleted]

Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

#210

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 7:22 PM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #203

smsm42 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever have car insurance or any other kind of insurance? Most insurances have deductibles, and the point of that is that insurance is to prevent catastrophic loss, not every expense. There can be insurance that covers 100% of expenses, but it will be very expensive, especially for health, as it won't be insurance at all. Imagine that 1000 people pay each $100 into insurance pool. Then if somebody has a problem…

Did you ever have car insurance or any other kind of insurance? Yes. I go with the largest excess possible (what I assume is also called a deductible) because the chance of making a claim is low. But it's only 10-20% more to have no excess at all. The logic in your second paragraph makes sense on the surface, but the lack of a deductible in many European-style health systems doesn't seem to result in a larger share o…

The difference between medical & car insurance is certainity of small expenses. If your insurance covered regular maintenance of the car, it would be substantially more expensive.