Only insofar as they can cancel your coverage at any time for no reason, and tie you up in court until you die of your illness. As an member of an employee group health insurance plan, I have absolutely no power to choose a different insurance policy, or sue them for punitive damages if I think they have screwed me.
I take it you’ve never spent a day on the phone insisting to some clerk that they do have to cover something.
And if you think a big insurance company is more than slightly annoyed, at most, by the thought of being sued by some yutz whose entire finances are already being devoted to the process of staying alive, then you certainly have not had any direct involvement with one.
No, they cannot cancel you for any reason and no, they can and do lose court cases. They win some too but the big payouts are all about punitive damages. Have you tried to sue the government lately?
Federal law prevents anyone covered under an employer group health insurance plan from suing an insurance company for punitive damages. That has not happened since the federal ERISA statuteswere passed in 1974.
Do contracts for one-off insurance prohibit the insurance company from not renewing for the next term? It is not likely to be a problem for a large group since they would lose too much if the company bailed.
I know my father-in law got his group medical coverage canceled. I don’t blame them that much - he is 96, and was the last person alive in his group.
Following the terms of a contract and screwing your customer are not mutually exclusive things. As Dylan quoting Woody Guthrie said “some people rob you with a fountain pen.”
I didn’t argue the point, I said you’d have a representative.
No, but the government doesn’t have a profit motive to screw me over, unlike my insurance company. And I’ve worked to elect government officials who will do the job I want them to do.
Uhm yeah, politicians always keep their word. However, the government will be on a cost saving program, it has to.
It’s a fact that government provided healthcare in every other first world industrialized nation is cheaper than ours.
This is especially absurd considering that we don’t even cover a fifth of our population,
And insurance execs always keep theirs?
Sure, the government will be trying to keep down costs- they’d be fools not to. However, they don’t have the profit motive that insurance companies have. They don’t make *more *money by giving *fewer *benefits. They don’t have boardmembers who cut corners and costs so they have even more money in their golden parachutes.
I wonder why you keep looking for the bad things in government-provided healthcare, while ignoring the very same issues in private insurance? And I must also wonder why you repeatedly ignore the fact that countries with socialized medicine have better healthcare than a multibillion-dollar for-profit industry can give us, here. We’re spending more and receiving less- it’s very clear that our system is broken. Why do you defend it so?
“We” only cover civil servents, Medicare and maybe Medicaid. Since we don’t have universal care you can’t say who we don’t cover. Besides, those numbers are inflated and many that can afford it, don’t. And you ignored everything I said about why our prices are ridiculous.
I answered most of that and you tell me I’m ignoring things? I trust profit motives much more than bureaucrats. To make a profit, you need to offer a service that people want and will pay for. If you program sucks, people go elesewhere. Why do you only see good in government and bad in free markets? If you’re a died in the wool socialist/communist we just will never agree. And I am far from convinced that socialized medicine is superior, I see the asserion often but never any evidence.
That is a very large number, expecially if you include active miliitary and retirees.
Employees have no control over the health insurance their employer offers. Their choice is limited to take it, or look for a new job. That is not a free market.
You don’t understand the issue properly and it’s coloring your conclusions.
When I say that “we” spend more than any other country on Earth and cover fewer people and get worse results (specifically worse results than other first world countries), I’m not referring to what the government specifically pays. I’m referring to the entire amount spent on health care in America. Public and private.
We, as a whole, spend more than any other country and get less coverage and worse results. That is the system an idiot would choose. We can get better, cheaper results by using a universal system. As a country we would pay less, public and private. It is factually a more efficient way to do things.
The only reason to be against a system that costs the country less, produced better results and covers more people is ideological. It is simply irrational to prefer our system.
It also bears mentioning that the free market cannot make it profitable to pay medical bills that cost more than premiums. Which means the free market can’t find a solution to high-risk or chronically sick people.
It’s not necessarily irrational. There are a few premises one can start with that make it a proportionate response. One framework is the just world hypothesis: bad things happen to bad people. Say if an marketing executive for McDonalds is very rich and healthy, he is virtuous. It would be an unfair requirement for him to pay for the statins or whatever for the Oprah watching person (that happens to enjoy the ads he oversees) that develops high blood cholesterol. There are a further two rational bases for preferring a system that penalises the poor (both may have the just world hypothesis as a motivator: the first is the concept of property rights as being absolute over those of human rights, which I hope would be a fair summation of Nozick’s philosophy. The second would be that of Social Darwinism, where those that deserve to die do so. Of course, the ideological restriction on the poor from gathering to oppose hoarding from individuals is particular to this philosophy, indicating it isn’t exclusively based on naturalistic arguments (in nature, groups of individuals with fewer resources may overcome individuals higher in the hierarchy with many).
I would contend that believing the world is inherently just is irrational.
Ah, sorry, brutalised my own post in editing. That should be “a marketing” and “as a motivator):”.
Edit:
I don’t disagree. It’d still be a somewhat logical argument, just with false premises.
Insurance companies make profit by taking in premium payments while keeping their payouts to a minimum. If 10% of the population costs too much to cover, the other 90% don’t even notice. But hey, if you’ve got yours, why worry about it?
Our system works great… as long as you don’t expect it to actually *do anything. If you cost the insurance company too much, you’ll be cut. This is a fact; it happens all the time. It’s also something which doesn’t seem to happen in other countries.
I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool socialist/communist. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool realist. Presumably, that will also keep us from agreeing.
*I’m sure someone is, at this very moment, scouring the internet for socialized medicine horror stories. I guarantee you, though, that for every socialized medicine horror story you can find, I can find just as many privatized medicine horror stories. I can also find many more examples of Americans going bankrupt under our capitalist system than you can find in socialized medicine.