Healthhcare is a scam?

Thank god you don’t make any decisions concerning our health and are limited to tinfoil hat conspiracy theories that you post on this board.

My daughter cost 6.8 million dollars just to be able to see her first birthday. According to your posts on the subject, if you had the ability, you would deny treatment...

Your argument sounds pretty darn fascists when you want to deny healthcare to those that want a proven procedure; solely due to you not liking their behavior.

Speaking of behavior, wasn’t your lack of “behavior” regarding a certain part of your health; mocked by others on this board just recently?

 

The free market should not apply to healthcare. Insurance companies make money on the healthy, because while they pay for the insurance product, they don't use it. On the contrary, it is impossible for health insurance companies to make money on the elderly. Why? Because between 8.5% and and 11.2% of our entire healthcare costs will be spent the last 12 months of our lives. That gets very expensive, very quickly.

Americans are more unhealthy than other countries, but part of the problem is many Americans can't afford to seek preventative care. We spend more money out of pocket than any other country, yet see a doctor about half as regularly as other countries. In short, we spent way too much on cures, and not enough on prevention.

A big part of the issue is for even for those with insurance, is there is a cost just to walk into the doctor's office. With nationalized healthcare in other countries, this doesn't happen, because visits are covered. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and one reason why we are less healthy than other countries is the out of pocket costs for the ounce of prevention prevents many on the lower end of the economic spectrum from seeking prevention; which causes us to pay for cure down the line instead.

This is very likely why as a percent of GDP, other industrialized nations' government pay a similar dollar amount as the US. The difference is private spending and out of pocket costs, which for the US, is exorbitant as compared to these countries. Which points to the fact that if we could shift our spending to more preventative care, we'd likely lower our overall spending. Also points out that if we had a socialized system where doctor visits were covered, that too would lower overall costs.

 

Nobody will ever convince me that us smokers don't pay our fair share. Everybody is going to be a drain on the system our last few years of our lives, smokers time just comes early. In most cases we pay in all our lives only to die before we turn 65. Then ya got to figure in tobacco tax, usually a couple bucks a pack on the state level and a buck or so on the federal level. Multiply that by 2 packs a day over 50 years and it pays a lot of expenses.

 

No. It is not that at all. You pay a much lower premium and have coverage for high dollar events. What “insurance” is suppose to be. I don’t want to pay for gender transition coverage. Shoot. I don’t want to pay the insurer to then have them pay my doctor for a visit. The insurer has to make money so they can be the middle man.

If you want to pay high premiums to cover every little thing…I think you should be able to. Just like you should be able to pay low premiums to cover you for rare events.

I don’t like paying for insurance at all. But it is a necessary product. Right now we pay about $1100 a year for a high deductible HSA family of five. It is fantastic. It is a grandfathered plan. Can’t believe we still have it. If we ever lose it…we will switch to a medical concierge practice or work a deal with our doctor and join a cost sharing plan to cover catastrophic events most likely. To get a PPO plan like ours that is aca compliant. We would basically double our premiums. Completely unnecessary. Nice part is we have a whole lot of money built up in our HSA now as well. If only we would use this philosophy in how we approached policy.

 

This is pure hyperbolic crying and screaming like a child.

I never said I would deny your daughter for any treatment. Stop making crap up like a spoiled child.

Never did I say we should deny healthcare to anyone. Shoot I never said you should not be able to buy insurance for whatever you want. In fact I am all for one’s ability to spend as much as they wish for it. But others should not have to buy gender transition coverage as an example of a mandated coverage that should not be forced onto people.

Clearly a catastrophic or Cadillac insurance plan would have covered your daughter. Grow up and spare me the child like hissy fit.

I have no clue what you are talking about with my behavior either…

 

I never said you did not pay your fair share. I just said that each younger generation is subsidizing the older generations.

What is your kids “fair share”?

 

Yes, those are junk policies. I've sold them back when they were more common. They don't even cover "typical" costly things like pregnancy and have huge deductibles. They also typically cap their life time payouts, so even if you have a catastrophic event that is covered, they limit their risk ceiling that way too. Some of them cant be renewed or expire after a few months because they are sold as temporary. They exist to harvest money to pay the claims on other comprehensive policies insurers sell. You are basically giving them money to pay other people's claims. The premiums aren't much but they can bank on that money being in the pot because they barely pay any claims on those policies. You are paying for the idea that you have insurance, but when it comes time to use it, you are going to find you dont get to use it. Fortunately the ACA mostly eliminated those for people over 30.

You've also said people need to get healthier and one way to do that is regular doctor visits, which you dont want to pay for. So we have a country where people ignore their health until it can no longer be ignored, because what is most profitable is treatment, not prevention. That's the incentives of a privatized system. Costs are cut by not covering stuff and profits are made by charging people lots of money when they are sick. All the worst incentives are baked into any sort of for-profit model.

 

Your preventative visit to the doctor in this country is covered. Just paid for through insurance.

That said…I 100% agree we need to shift our focus to preventive care. We are way too focused on cure the event.

 

Not as much as your addiction costs society. We would all be better off if all smokers quit.

 

Same with drinkers but drunks aren't the bad guys. It is the guy standing off to the side smoking a cigarette minding his own business.

 

What? You must not watch many movies.

 

Polluting the whole environment in your vicinity.

 

Knew who the "dislike" was before I even checked. .

 

LOL you know that was aimed at the too hot lawyer crew? Goal accomplished!

 

I fairness, I think our crew are not the ambulance chasing types.

 

This may be instructive.
Although it's part of the great myth perpetuated by health insurance companies and medical associations that lawyers are responsible for rising medical costs, malpractice lawsuits and insurance actually represent a very small fraction of medical costs. In fact, unless one is the victim of very serious malpractice in which damages would be relatively high it's frequently difficult for victims of malpractice to find attorneys. Not saying that there aren't frivolous lawsuits but they tend to be very rare.
Medical liability costs in U.S. pegged at 2.4 percent of annual health care spending

By the way part of the problem and I hopes it's changing is that state medical boards tend to be very reluctant to pull the licenses of incompetent physicians and frequently an incompetent doctor whose license has been pulled in one state can simply set up practice in another state because there is little cross checking
Bad Docs Give Up Licenses, But Not Medical Practice