Health Care Reforms - Only Requires Health Insurance Reforms

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Health Care Reforms - Only Requires Health Insurance Reforms

Posted by dividendtree 982 days ago, popular 981 days ago (http://www.dividendtree.net)
Category: Economy | Tags: health care

Like in any other sector, all it requires is controlling greed of insurance companies. We need to control the business practices of insurance companies. In my opinion, insurance companies for their business interest have screwed the whole health

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invest-like-buffet 982 days ago

very true, like wall street, now the health insurers are getting drunk. someday its going to burst, but unfortunately, its directly affect people's health.......

shakaaltakla 982 days ago

nice short summary of issues. Nails the root cause.

ravinrenie 981 days ago

interesting perspective, but aren't medical professional (doctors) getting paid huge sum? have we said admin cost are 30 to 40%? probably that's not insurance driven!

furball4 981 days ago

Companies only have the luxury of indulging greed in markets that exhibit certain attributes. Those attributes are: monopoly, subsidy, and regulation.

There are very few natural monopolies; most are government-granted. All intellectual property rights are a government-granted monopoly, as are all electromagnetic spectrum rights and many utility infrastructures.

Subsidies are another government specialty. The loan industry is subsidized when they are allowed to borrow from the government at below-market interest rates - subsidized by all users of pre-existing dollars. And any borrower is subsidized when the government agrees to guarantee their loan. Without those subsidies our natural greed would not have been able to indulge itself to the extent that created a recession - we simply wouldn't have been able to afford it. The costs of our lending and borrowing would have been tied to actual production or economic expansion, and would have faced mounting headwinds whenever it ran ahead of those things. Many utilities infrastructures were subsidized as well, at the time of their construction if not in their ongoing operation.

Heavily regulated industries are nearly always hotbeds for greed and waste. Banking, healthcare, insurance, communications, education and utilities. The regulations stifle innovation and competition, and are often literally written by the major players. If not written by them in the first place, they are lobbied into weapons that are used to aggrandize existing players and keep new players from bothering to compete.

Healthcare suffers from all three. Governmental interference has divorced consumers from product selection, and even from costs. Tax breaks for businesses buying insurance make no sense; consumers shouldn't be at a tax disadvantage to *anyone* when purchasing insurance for themselves. The present tax law represents a subsidy that distorts normal market effects. By refusing to enforce contracts, the government has made it impossible for me to reasonably limit the liability of my care providers, driving up costs without regard to what I want to pay. I can't even save money by forgoing privacy features, despite the fact that I don't give a rip if everyone on the planet knows my medical history. No, every entity I deal with must be HIPAA-compliant, at massive cost, because that is a feature that some other people care about, some of the time. Nor does anyone offer a whole-life healthcare insurance product, because every year the government changes the rules on what they have to cover and how they have to run their companies. No one can predict their costs far enough into the future to write a long-term policy. Nor can I opt for cut-rate medical service. I can't just get my teeth cleaned by a hygienist who has been doing it for 30 years. No, they have to be under the nominal direction of a state-certified dentist, driving the cost of a simple cleaning up by about 4x.

In short, consumers no longer purchase insurance directly, nor are they allowed to manage their own risks, or select their own providers (from the *entire* population), or individually judge the desirability of expensive features. So why should we expect them to have any power? And if they have no power, how do we expect them to get what they want? Because politicians are going to a) know what in the world that is, and b) actually succeed at forcing someone to provide it to them, at a reasonable cost? Please. That requires more faith than anyone should have in their entire body.

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