I think we are over-insured

What, are your wife and kids sickly cripples? Man up and get rid of your family's insurance. If they are healthy like you they won't need it.

John SmaIIberries wrote:

If I had it to do all over again I would have gone with no health insurance and the very bare minimum of auto and home insurance until I was married and had children.

I thought like you and switched to a high deductible ($3500) policy in 2007. My kid grabbed the stove that year. Then, in 2008, the red splotch on my wife's arm turned out to be skin cancer. Then, in 2009, I started crapping blood for a few weeks and had to have a bunch of tests to rule out anything serious. Now it turns out the wife is probably pregnant, just in time for the 2010 policy year.

That's $14,000 I'll never get back. But hey, at least I get about a quarter of that back come tax time!

I thought you were a Democrat?

I don't even notice the price of insurance. I just treat it as if my taxes were 5% higher.

yeah, smallberries I thought you were a bleedin' heart screaming from the trees socialist dem Obama lover?

What's wrong insurance premimum come due this month?

Hehehehe, me thinks some trolling is afoot.

satansmouf wrote:

yeah, smallberries I thought you were a bleedin' heart screaming from the trees socialist dem Obama lover?

What's wrong insurance premimum come due this month?

It isn't me. The OP is an impostor. Looks like it is time for a new handle.

And the OP/impostor's post is a bit indecipherable politically. The screed against insurance premuims going to treat smokers and obese people simultaneously suggests the need for government intervention into public health as well as a hyper-individualist pay your own way system.

Meanwhile, John Smallberries is no more. I will re-emerge as . . . .

John Smallberries wrote:

satansmouf wrote:

yeah, smallberries I thought you were a bleedin' heart screaming from the trees socialist dem Obama lover?

What's wrong insurance premimum come due this month?

It isn't me. The OP is an impostor. Looks like it is time for a new handle.

And the OP/impostor's post is a bit indecipherable politically. The screed against insurance premuims going to treat smokers and obese people simultaneously suggests the need for government intervention into public health as well as a hyper-individualist pay your own way system.

Meanwhile, John Smallberries is no more. I will re-emerge as . . . .

Make sure it's something with no lower case L's. That's how they get you. It was really funny when someone did that to Flagpole though. What this guy did...not so much. I mean you go to the trouble of faking someone's user name, just to write that? Weird.

John SmaIIberries wrote:

The price of insurance is ridiculous. It seems like the insurance companies and agents getting the commission are just going out of their way to increase the policy limits yet add more and more policy exclusions.

And here we all are paying out thousands of dollars every year so the insurance companies can use our premiums to pay the costs of the underinsured, overly fed, and nicotine addicted along with the over population of attornies in this country.

If I had it to do all over again I would have gone with no health insurance and the very bare minimum of auto and home insurance until I was married and had children.

No health insurance is a bad idea. Even young people have big medical problems that creep up, and it can ruin you financially. An over night stay in a hospital can cost you $15,000 or more. That's crazy. I DO like the idea of lower-cost health insurance that puts more of the burden of office visits and so on on the patient. I shouldn't need a co-pay of $20 if I need to go to the doctor. I'd rather pay less for the insurance and pay full price for an office visit if I need to go in.

This just shows exactly why people in the US will never understand why single payer is the superior way to pay for health care. When someone goes without homeowners or auto insurance and they suffer a loss, the people with insurance do not see an increase in their premiums or cost of auto/home repairs. That is because when you wreck your car, you can always take the bus or carpool. Or if your home burns down, you can rent an apartment. Uninsured suffer a major economic loss, but life goes on.

But, when you get sick, you have no choice but to get treatment and providers have to provide treatment in the case of life and death. And the cost of treatment is frequently well beyond what most Americans can pay out of pocket and is often too expensive even with good health insurance.

In a single payer system, everyone pays through progressive taxation and no one is left with crippling medical bills. No one games the system by going without insurance. And there is an incentive towards public health programs to minimize the burdens of preventable illness (i.e. smoking, obesity). In a private insurance system, people can game the system by going without insurance. There is also no incentive to reduce costs through public health initiatives.

Some 50 years ago, the "co-pay" was 50% of the cost of treatment. Now, the entitlement attitude is, I'll give you my $15, and the rest of the treatment's FREE. Yippee. Who cares how much the unnecessary and cover-your-ass testing costs? That's why HSAs make a lot of sense. Shift the onus of accountability on to the consumer, force competition, and cultivate price transparency. That way we can balance the coming increase in demand. We don't have a health insurance reform crisis so much as we have a plain-old fashioned health crisis.

I don't know about being "over-insured," but we are definitely over-lawyered. Amazing how the laws of supply and demand don't pertain to lawyers. They seem to always have pricing power in any economic environment.

So, if we are going to have czars capping physicians' pay (oh, wait, that's right, some of the physicians "signed on." Hmmm, wonder what enticed them to do that...?) How about we have czars that cap lawyer pay and punitive damages for "stress and suffering."

1. Damages for pain and suffering are compensatory damages, not punitive.

2. Many law practice suffer first in a bad economy. When companies run short on cash, the first ones they put on slow pay are the attorneys. Right now, many law firms have become de facto lenders to their clients.

3. HSAs are idiotic. Consumers do not have sufficient knowledge to understand whether one test is needed or not, or whether one course of treatment is better than the other. No one should be put in a position where their treatment decisions are guided by their pocketbook.

4. Doctors should be paid well, but should not be trying to be multi-millionaires. That is why doctors overtreat. They make more money. In states with med mal reform, health care costs have continued to rise. Doctors are not practicing defensive medicine. The are practicing offenisive medicine by agressively providing the maximum amount of testing and treatment in order to make the most money.

Most everyone can agree we need reform. However, our problem is not that we're suffering from too much economic freedom in healthcare, it's precisely the opposite. Healthcare is incredibly regulated and not surprisingly it's raising prices.

Obama or anyone can't defy the laws of supply and demand. Once healthcare is "free" demand will go up. As it is now people pay far too little out of pocket with insurance.

The number one problem with insurance is that not enough people have it. People treat it not as insurance but as something to pay medical bills. They don't get insurance until they think they need it when in reality people should start paying into the system when they are young.

No matter what we do to reform the system the most important thing that we need is a MANDATE. And I think both smart democrats and republicans can get behind that.

In 1960, 97% of drug costs were paid out of pocket. Now, less than 25% of drug costs are paid out of pocket. This has the effect of raising prices to a level that is almost unpayable unless you have insurance (the very root of the problem). Health insurance is a weird type of insurance. Home owners insurance or auto insurance protects you in case you are terribly unlucky and you get in an accident or your house burns down. But health insurance is covering things like routine doctors visits and long term perscriptions-insurance for that is hardly risk avoidance. The thing is, if no one had insurance, everyone would be better off because prices would be far lower, but because most of the population has it, everyone pretty much needs it, and there is no way to wean the country as a whole off the system.

Mtn Dew wrote:

Obama or anyone can't defy the laws of supply and demand. Once healthcare is "free" demand will go up. As it is now people pay far too little out of pocket with insurance.

This is precisely right. It is the primary reason why every other country in the world with "free" government-subsidized or government-provided health care spends a lot more than the US, and with worse results.

(Oh, wait, every other country spends LESS -- most of the time about half as much -- with better health outcomes? Never mind....)

Mtn Dew wrote:

Most everyone can agree we need reform. However, our problem is not that we're suffering from too much economic freedom in healthcare, it's precisely the opposite. Healthcare is incredibly regulated and not surprisingly it's raising prices.

Obama or anyone can't defy the laws of supply and demand. Once healthcare is "free" demand will go up. As it is now people pay far too little out of pocket with insurance.

That's precisely correct. No one would argue that we DON'T need healtch care reform of some kind. No one would argue that the kind of access those without insurance (the 10-15 million chronically uninsured) have now (emergency room, subsidized university hospital) is inefficient. However, medicare, Hillary-care implemented under a conservative governor in Mass, and the heavily subsidized VA, which enables patients to "double-dip" in the private sector are the failing proxies for a single-payor model. And the bigest point being missed in all of this is that Americans are gluttinous, unhealthy fat-asses relative to the world. This isn't cute little, oil-rich Norway, where 25% of the citizens aren't at work on any given day, and they are generally thin and eat a lot of arctic fish to begin with.

We have a HEALTH CRISIS in this country, first and foremost. I can compromise and pay my extra 2% in marginal taxes to subsidize the despondent IF you meet my other demands of more competition, less regulation, more PERSONAL accountability, more price transparency, AND tort litigation reform (so that we can bring down physician liability insurance costs and reduce cover-your-ass testing).

You increase demand on the liabilities side, you'd sure as hell better increase some assets on the asset side to balance. Look at medicare. Actuarial assumptions for 1990 were some $9 billion (I'm going from memory), but they ended up being $60 billion. THINK about that gap. And it's now 20 years later and we are bankrupt. There's your single-payor model folks.

Frankly, with the Fed teetering on a tight-rope between deflation and inflation and a very unhealthy bank balance sheet situation EVEN STILL, we have bigger fish to fry than Obama getting pulled by the centrifugal force of the far left (Pelosi) and exhausting all of his political bullets on this "Holy Grail." Government overspending, protectionism, and overzealous regulation prolonged the Great Depression. Let's not make the same mistake again. Remember, Obama has lower approval ratings and less Congressional support for his byzantine plan than even Bush did going into Iraq.

My $0.02 wrote:

This is precisely right. It is the primary reason why every other country in the world with "free" government-subsidized or government-provided health care spends a lot more than the US, and with worse results.

(Oh, wait, every other country spends LESS -- most of the time about half as much -- with better health outcomes? Never mind....)

Define "better outcomes". The US has much better technology and shorter wait times compared to say, Canada.

It's difficult to compare the US and Europe. The US has a very different population, we're fatter and more heterogenous.

Imagine how costly car insurance would be if it included oil changes, tire rotations, alignments, timing belts and anything else that is part of routine car upkeep.

I don't even think a routine pregnancy should be paid by insurance. Insurance is for things one has no control over.

Remember that heart disease and diabetes (primarily type 2) eat up half of the cost of medicare. Do you really think we can and should subsidize a life time of insulin shots and multiple stent procedures and pay for everyone's statins, when these problems are largely preventable to begin with.

People think there's a whole sea of money out there, and that it can't possibly shrink and that we need to split it up differently. While I believe it is a moral imperative (not a constitutional right) to insure the uninsured, I believe the BIGGER moral imperative is not to destroy the dollar, encourage an exodus of capital overseas, and prolong/exacerbate the economic malaise.

Why we are not talking about the coming energy crisis (unless deflation gains the traction I think it may have already) and putting people to work building nuclear reactors and retrofitting our automotive fleet with natural gas or biodiesel confounds me to the nth degree, especially when so much of health and disease rests solely upon what we put in our "engines" every day. And that can be easily changed.