Your potential problems are the real issues with going to just catastrophic coverage. This is something conservatives love as an alternative as it’s cheaper than full care, but the result will just be poorer and more cash strapped people choosing to stave off doctor visits to save money. This can and will produce worse results if going to the doctor was not an out of pocket expense.
There are solutions to this, Singapore seems to have government MANDATED health savings accounts that confiscate around 20% of your wages and store it away into a health account. I believe this can be pooled and accessed by family members. The benefit here is that going to the doctor for incidental issues will draw from the mandated savings account and not your own general funds that people tend to allocate towards other more pressing things.
The libertarian might retort that, well, they SHOULD prioritize for potential healthcare expenses.
True, and people should be kind to each other as well, but let’s not construct society as if what should happen is what will happen. Especially for delayed feedback effects like health issues that come abruptly without the kind of learning curve feedback that can train people to get on top of those things.
Conservatives have poisoned me, I listen to so much talk radio I am reflexively trying to preemptively counteract their confused conceptions of the world.
Yep, that was four years ago, prior to the ACA so I took a risk on a cheap policy that might have been cancelled if I had a major illness.
Now I have permanent coverage for $198/month that cannot be cancelled and does not limit me to particular providers or pre-approvals. My deductible is $2180.
Have you never had the pharmacy point out that paying up-front is cheaper than going through insurance? I’ve had them point that out to me several times with generic medications for my children, like amoxicillin and things like cough suppressants.
From what I can tell, where the pharmacy portion of the insurance really “gets” you is in the composition of their formulary. Your Dr. may look at you and decide to prescribe you Diovan for your high blood pressure, and then you find out that you’ll pay 70% of the prescription because it’s in some odd category on the formulary. Point this out to your Dr., and he may change your prescription to Losartan, as it’s in the 100% covered category on the formulary.
That’s what I don’t much care for- the insurance companies effectively making treatment choices for the doctors. I know that neither you nor the doctors are required to follow the formulary, if you’re willing to pay full price out of pocket, but who really is willing to do that? So you’re both hamstrung by what the insurance company thinks is appropriate for your condition, regardless of what your doctor may think.
I’m an advocate for universal health care, if only because it’s a way to cut the Gordian knot of health care cost increases and Byzantine insurance regulations and the sort of accounting-based care I detailed above in my prescription example.
But the fundamental problem is that the information for the consumers is woefully incomplete- you can’t make an informed decision with what’s available to you, and even when you can, it’s still ultimately a gamble, like all insurance is. And with most of the US population being barely educated and kind of stupid, it’s not surprising that people don’t understand how all this works and aren’t making good decisions with respect to it.
It’s not easy to determine the best insurance plan at all- my company now has 5 separate plans- a high deductible, a 80/20, a 90/10 and a 95/5, all with slightly different stipulations. I’m a veteran database programmer and data modeling guy, and it took me days to gin up a spreadsheet that could even begin to compare apples to apples on these plans. And even then, which plan was the cheapest overall was highly dependent on the magnitude of the claims that were billed back to the insurance.
It literally was a situation where for different total claim amounts per year, different plans were cheapest. So I sort of guestimated what our usual annual claim amount is, and chose based on that.
But I don’t expect some guy who stands there and says “Welcome to Costco. I love you.” all day to have the skill or wherewithal to crank out a spreadsheet like that. He’s just essentially taking a monster guess as to what might be his best deal in a situation like that.
You won’t get it, because it isn’t true. Insurance will be billed $400. The explanation of benefits will show the amount you paid, the insurer’s contractual adjustment of the remaining balance, and the amount the insurer actually paid (which will be - surprise! - the amount they actually paid).
You sound like a typical over emotional ruled by fear idiot. You think that’s disrespectful? Well have some respect and read what the guy actually said. He recommended catastrophe health insurance to cover exactly what you’re talking about, did you even read that part??? Besides, you are the exception to the rule, MOST people are being ripped off for everyday health care.
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You realize that under Obamacare, all health insurance companies must pay out 80%+ of all its premiums in health care benefits or it must rebate all its policy holders. This is the percentage that the insurance companies picked because virtually all large insurance companies were comfortably within this medical loss ratio.
So on average the pool of people being insured are being ripped off to the tune of less than 20% of the money they pay (and in many cases its a lot less than 20%) to pay for the reserves and the overhead. The person who gets cancer might be getting tons of benefits but its a lottery, he got cancer and got really good value for his insurance premium and you didn’t get cancer and have to live with the fact that you may never get cancer and get to take advantage of all that insurance coverage that you’ve been paying for year in and year out.
Its sort of how all insurance works. You pool money and pool risks and pay out to the ones who need the payment.
One little snag : if the employer were to give back what it spends on our health insurance, we’d have to pay tax on that. Given that it’s about 20k+ these days per employee, only really high paying jobs even have health insurance as a benefit. So those taxpayers are already paying on the order of 40-50% tax.
That’s 15% payroll tax, 25% federal income tax, and many of these higher paying jobs are in blue states, so around 5% state tax.
So the average taxpayer would pay almost half that million dollars away in tax.
The way a liberal site like Huffington Post would put it is that middle class taxpayers are being subsidized to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a year so that they can have healthcare. (by not being taxed on that part of their salary). This is an arguable point but is more or less true from a mathematics sense.