I for one do not care for insurance companies, particularly health insurance companies which you cannot take to court when they turn you down if it is employer supplied. I do not care for their profit motivated “death panels”.
I prefer the United States Post Office office to FedEx and UPS, however I sometimes use any and all of them.
I would like to be able to choose from one of three government health plans in addition to private plans, and if the private plans cannot compete, then fine.
The plan available to military families and veterans.
The plan available under Medicare.
The plan available to government employees.
The plan available to Congress critters.
Every year the cost of each plan would be divided up by the number of members, and each paying member of the public would be allowed to join for last years’s cost plus a percentage of profit, say 10 to 20 percent, depending on plans. Everyone would be accepted, regardless of pre-existing conditions. Private plans would still be run privately for profit by whatever laws already exist and still be allowed to screw with their policyholders like they do now. The 10 to 20 percent could go into the general fund, or to me, as royalties for my brilliant idea.
What say you? I want a government death panel, not a private insurance company death panel.
So the profits/losses would be divided solely among those who opt in to your system? If so, I’d support it wholeheartedly on one condition:
If this plan of yours becomes insolvent you won’t force the general public to pay to clean up your mess, and sufficient deterrent will exist to prevent any politicians trying to weasel out of this requirement.
No. There are no profits or losses. If there are one million federal employees and one million people pay to join, the entire cost of say 6 billion a year is divided up and each of the one million voluntary joiners pays one share – that is $3000 – plus 10 percent for a total of $3300. That 10 percent is like a golf handicap to the private insurers because they cannot possibly compete with public insurers on price.
The 10 percent (or whatever) profit can go to whatever stupid projects our esteemed lawmakers think it should go to. But because all the cost is divided up every year, then there is no loss. Unlike the multi-trillion dollar cost of the credit/debt swaps of 2008/2009.
I see we are in agreeance with my predicates and your conditioner. Personally I use Panteen, but in the interests of bi-partisanship, I’ll combobulate to your preferred brand.
So what happens next year when the program is horribly mismanged and starts taking on health care “functions” like building bridges in Alaska (fresh air and jobs are good for people’s health!) and your health insurance premium increases from $3300 to $137,111.23?
Who bails out the premium holders and the providers?
Sick people would join as they have no other way to get insurance and they’d be joining at the rate for relatively well people. Then they’d blow out the system with their sick person costs. The well people in the system would find their costs skyrocketing (but there’d be no insurance overhead so it’d be cheap!, I don’t think so), so the well people would drop out. Soon it would be all sick people incurring 50K or so in costs per year and they’d demand subsidies as they couldn’t pay it.
Yes, this would be a tendency to attract sick people. I don’t see how the members can “demand” subsidies in view of the fact that they cannot now “demand” health care for free with any expectation of getting it, so there is a large flaw in that tendency.
I don’t see the flaw here. http://www.vhi.ie/pdf/about/annual_report_ye_08.pdf page 11 indicates that it is in fact more expensive and they are having a short term increase over increased costs due to the aging population of their insureds. They needed to increase premiums 15 percent and not 7 percent. Yes, it is more expensive, but assuming that anyone can join, nearly twice as much is a bargain compared to the option of not having insurance.
Perhaps you have a more useful description than generally “just look at it”.