How about health insurance?

[billin]

It seems that health insurance may be the real crisis. The legislation passed deals more with health insurance than with health care. People are concerned with the various problems involved with all of the intricacies of the various insurance programs and making it all fair.

So why not one simple little reform. Eliminate health insurance, government subsidies, government directives, employee clinics, et al?

Everyone pays for their own. You get what you want, and pay for only what you want. That is freedom and that is fair. The cost of medical care would dramatically decrease and the quality would probably see a marked increase as people would be watching their investment much closer.....

 

[barker]

Insurance is a way of pooling together lots of people to provide coverage when one person is hurt. This works for house and car insurance, and is a similar concept for health insurance. I buy house insurance so that if my house burns down, I can get another house to live in. I buy heath insurance so if I get cancer or a heart attack, I can get health care without going bankrupt.

Are you suggesting we eliminate insurance and just let people pay what they can in a disaster like house fire, cancer, etc.?

 

[plex]

Well, this is a pretty easy question to answer. If you actually go so far as to say, lets abolish all forms of insurance. That would only allow people to self-insure. Self-insuring against catastrophic illness/injury requires $1-5M, depending on how much costs went down by replacing the highly inefficient 3rd party system we have now with a pure competitive market. That means that something like 90%+ of people would who end up in a catastrophic situation (this is a small group, but could be anyone), would not be able to afford the care they need. Everyone would have to make sure to set aside $1-5M, just in case they got really sick/injured, not for living expenses, assuming there is absolutely no other system other than self-insurance in place. Not a very workable situation.