Insurance for people with pre-existing conditions isn't insurance

Insurance companies are leeches of health care and represent 30% of every dollar spent. Ever notice how easy an insurance company is to find? Just go to the BIGGEST building in town. That will be your insurance company.

Fix healthcare?

Start by taking out this wasted layer cost and BAN all drug ads on tv the way they got rid of Joe Camel and the Marlboro man.

The problem is not that drug companies are allowed to advertise their products, it's that doctors are stupid enough to prescribe whatever their patients ask for. A good solution would be to deregulate medical training so that a new generation of competent physicians can emerge.

Yeah, those idiot doctors with their years and years of education...meanwhile "capitalist" majored in economics because he couldn't pass organic chemistry.

Your GP is usually barely functionally retarded regardless of how long he went to school.

Capitalist wrote:

Insurance is a business based on risk. The whole point of the arrangement is that clients will pay in more than they pay out. If insurance companties are forced to accept people with pre-existing conditions which require expensive treatment, that's not insurance at all; it's a mandate to provide free healthcare. It is a revolting injustice to both the insurance companies and the healthy clients whose costs will have to rise in order to pay for the of people with pre-existing conditions.

Just to let you know, I myself have a pre-existing condition and cannot get individual coverage; this is the value of group plans.

Just to be clear ...

It is a revolting injustice to force an insurance company to insure someone with pre-existing conditions, but the value of group plans is that insurance companies are then forced to insure people with pre-existing conditions?

Contradict yourself much?

Most people can only get group health through their employer and many employers either don't offer it or make employees pay for it out of pocket. A large segment of the population simply has no way to access a group plan.

You have actually made an excellent argument for single payer health care. A private health insurance system does not work because people have no choice whether to get health care or not. People have a choice whether they want to drive (auto), own a home (homeowner's), run a business (CGL, property, E&O, D&O, etc.) and so on. You can always live in an apartment, take the bus to work and walk to the store. But, if you have diabetes, you have no choice about whether you can get treatment for it. If you don't, you die. In the current system, people who are excluded for preexisting conditions get care, but the insurance company doesn't pay. The providers then overcharge other patients, particularly the uninsured, to compensate for the non-payment.

In a single payer system, everyone pays through taxes and costs are kept down because there are no profits on the insurer side, administrative costs are reduced to a fraction of what goes on now because you have a single system for payment instead of dozens, and the government run health insurance plan has real bargaining power with providers. But the real benefit is that no one is ever put into financial jeopardy by illness. The majority of bankruptcies in the US are cause by medical bills. For each bankruptcy, there are a myriad of losses down the line to the creditors. Under single payer, these would all end. Also US businesses would be able to compete with the rest of the world. Japan, Canada, Germany, France are all emerging from recession because of rising exports. The US is still stuck in recession because we have lost a massive chunk of our export industry due to the high cost of health care that employers are expected to provide in the US.

Insurance companies are in the business of making money, not healing people. Everyone potentially has a pre-existing condition according to the claims department. That's how they earn their bonuses. It just depends on how tenuous the link is that they discover in your medical history, and what you have or have not reported in that initial form that they will now pull out of the archives. They push the envelope to make/save money, and leave no stone unturned. We, on the other hand, are just human, and, unless independently wealthy, are at their mercy to help solve the immediate medical problem.

backwards wrote:

Just to be clear ...

It is a revolting injustice to force an insurance company to insure someone with pre-existing conditions, but the value of group plans is that insurance companies are then forced to insure people with pre-existing conditions?

Contradict yourself much?

It's not a contradition. Insurance companies offering group plans aren't forced to do anything. They create the plans on their own volition, offering coverage to people with pre-existing conditions on the priciple that companies who buy into the plans will enroll more healthy people than sick ones. There's no coersion involved there.

You are the biggest retard in the history of the internet.

Capitalist wrote:

It's not a contradition. Insurance companies offering group plans aren't forced to do anything. They create the plans on their own volition, offering coverage to people with pre-existing conditions on the priciple that companies who buy into the plans will enroll more healthy people than sick ones. There's no coersion involved there.

Ever hear of HIPAA?

backwards wrote:

Ever hear of HIPAA?

I work in medical billing and deal with HIPAA every day. I assure you that there is no contradition there.

Yeah, and every time a fat American smoker gets sick the premium goes up for ALL members of that group plan. The healthy ones subsidize the risky ones. Premiums increase every year as claims increase and the cost of treatment increases.

Buy your own individual plan when you are healthy and costs will increase only a little every year, even if you have claims. To hell with the sick, fat ones.

You can't insure a burning building.

"Your GP is usually barely functionally retarded regardless of how long he went to school."

This is true. As someone involved on the fringe of healthcare and interacting with a lot of GPs, they are in it for the money, the money, the money, Honey. Most know shit about making sick people better. They just refer you to a specialist when in doubt.

I have to agree with Mr. Smallberries. You [Capitalist] make a good point, and we can go ahead and add it to the list of suboptimal outcomes produced by a system totally dependent on private insurance.

casinos are big too wrote:

Insurance companies are leeches of health care and represent 30% of every dollar spent. Ever notice how easy an insurance company is to find? Just go to the BIGGEST building in town. That will be your insurance company.

My insurance company is in a football stadium?

Very good point. I am a healthy runner who doesn't drink or smoke, so I don't want to get lumped in a risk pool with people who don't. Free enterprise should take of this.

A single payer system won't do this. The single payer system works for fat ugly people. It doesn't work for thin attractive people.

"Insurance for people with pre-existing conditions isn't insurance"

Actually, "health insurance" in the US today isn't insurance. It is pre-paid health care.

I'm an American in Sweden. Sweden covers everyone while spending half of what we spend on healthcare. For that matter, the rest of the industrialized world does, too.

There are many things we don't leave entirely up to the free market--police, fire, roads, military, libraries, schools, etc. I don't know why healthcare should be addressed entirely in terms of free-market thinking, either.

The most liberal American healthcare plan under serious consideration would open Medicare up to people who are uninsured. That's it. Insurance companies still exist, and most people still are covered by them.

I think there's a very large difference between people who know they have a pre-existing condition and people who don't. If it's not something that has any symptoms or that a doctor can find during a physical, I think the patient should be covered. You shouldn't have to worry about paying for healthcare if you have every reason to believe that you're healthy and you have insurance.

Insurance company's expenses are close to 30% of every dollar and there are many components including reinsurance for large claims, state premium taxes and butt covering for HIPAA, COBRA and ERISA; all programs that the Fed's require and are responsible for 25% of costs when you include state mandates. The dems will slaughter this plan with mandates when in reality we should be stripping out benefits to make it more affordable. For example, whey does a 45+ year old woman need maternity benfits? Because by law pregnancy is considered an illness and has to be covered in group plans. Note that 70% of Canadians carry private insurance to augment the gov't plan and drugs aren't covered.