Health-Status Insurance: How Markets Can Provide Health Security

KingCondanomation

KingCondanomation

New member
Instead of continuing down the road of ever increasing government role in healthcare, which has done nothing but increase cost and leave more without insurance, let us try a new approach.

"None of us has health insurance, really. If you develop a long-term condition such as heart disease or cancer, and if you then lose your job or are divorced, you can lose your health insurance. You now have a preexisting condition, and insurance will be enormously expensive—if it’s available at all.

Free markets can solve this problem, and provide life-long, portable health security, while enhancing consumer choice and competition. "Heath-status insurance" is the key. If you are diagnosed with a long-term, expensive condition, a health-status insurance policy will give you the resources to pay higher medical insurance premiums. Health-status insurance covers the risk of premium reclassification, just as medical insurance covers the risk of medical expenses.

With health-status insurance, you can always obtain medical insurance, no matter how sick you get, with no change in out-of-pocket costs. With health-status insurance, medical insurers would be allowed to charge sick people more than healthy people, and to compete intensely for all customers. People would have complete freedom to change jobs, move, or change medical insurers. Rigorous competition would allow us to obtain better medical care at lower cost.

Most regulations and policy proposals aimed at improving long-term insurance—including those advanced in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign— limit competition and consumer choice by banning risk-based premiums, forcing insurers to take all comers, strengthening employer-based or other forced pooling mechanisms, or introducing national health insurance.

The individual health insurance market is already moving in the direction of health-status insurance. To let health-status insurance emerge fully, we must remove the legal and regulatory pressure to provide employer-based group insurance over individual insurance and remove regulations limiting risk-based pricing and competition among health insurers."
http://cato.org/pubs/pas/html/pa-633/pa-633index.html
 
Great. All we have to do is force everyone into the single-person market where they can be assraped with huge fees and terrible service, and actually have to pay to not get dropped if they get diagnosed with cancer. This is such an excellent solution I wonder why anyone, besides health insurance execs of course, had not thought of this before dano.
 
Watermark said:
Great. All we have to do is force everyone into the single-person market where they can be assraped with huge fees and terrible service, and actually have to pay to not get dropped if they get diagnosed with cancer. This is such an excellent solution I wonder why anyone, besides health insurance execs of course, had not thought of this before dano.
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No, what you need to do is STOP forcing employers to provide it as part of the cost of an employee, this would allow them to be more competitive and employees would have more pure salary (like contractors do) as they forgo that benefit.
This would encourage people to buy it themselves, where you get the STRONGEST possible watching of healthcare costs because it would cost them directly for poor health decisions and poor lifestyle habits.

2 facts are indisputable in why we should move in this direction:
1. The state has only continually gotten more heavily involved in healthcare
2. Healthcare has only gotten more continually expensive with worsening quality.

If anything healthcare execs LOVE the Obama plan because having government pay for it means people won't care at all about how much things cost and use it far more.
 
KingCondanomation said:
No, what you need to do is STOP forcing employers to provide it as part of the cost of an employee, this would allow them to be more competitive and employees would have more pure salary (like contractors do) as they forgo that benefit.
This would encourage people to buy it themselves, where you get the STRONGEST possible watching of healthcare costs because it would cost them directly for poor health decisions and poor lifestyle habits.

2 facts are indisputable in why we should move in this direction:
1. The state has only continually gotten more heavily involved in healthcare
2. Healthcare has only gotten more continually expensive with worsening quality.

If anything healthcare execs LOVE the Obama plan because having government pay for it means people won't care at all about how much things cost and use it far more.
Click to expand...


1) Employers aren't forced to provide health insurance. They are encouraged to do so through tax policy.

2) This only works if you make it expensive for people to get healthcare, which is pretty much the point of this and similar plans. Specifically, they presume that we consume too much healthcare and with things priced accordingly and the burden on the individual, we would consume less.

3) Why doesn't the free market offer this health status insurance if it is such a grand idea?
 
We don't consume too much healthcare. There are a lot of problems in this nation caused by the fact that we don't go to the doctor enough - the worst thing for this nations collective health would be to institute a policy that discouraged visiting the doctor when you'res ick.
 
Conservatives are unbelievably dense. This makes me happy because they come up with the worst ideas ever, back them like they believe them, then get kicked out of power for being useless.
 
Having insurance thru a company or group provider is the best way to go.

Unless you are part of a group plan, the insurance company can drop you for way too many reasons. If during one year you spend more than you paid in premiums, they will drop you like a hot potato. This will be done regardless of how many years you have paid into the policy.


any employee who voluntarily denies themselves health insurance should be fired for being a moron.

Anyone who doesn't count the value of the various insurances and other benefits their employer provides as part of their compensation package is too ignorant to keep. And I have known several people who have left one job for another when the increase in pay did not cover the benefits lost.
 
Dungheap said:
1) Employers aren't forced to provide health insurance. They are encouraged to do so through tax policy.
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Financial coercion then. The point I was making to water is that insurance companies cannot force you to buy from them in an individual payer system.

Dungheap said:
2) This only works if you make it expensive for people to get healthcare, which is pretty much the point of this and similar plans. Specifically, they presume that we consume too much healthcare and with things priced accordingly and the burden on the individual, we would consume less.
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NO, with individual plans people have an incentive to shop around and actually for once to give a shit about cost, the industry thus then has an incentive to be more competitive and offer better value for money.

Dungheap said:
3) Why doesn't the free market offer this health status insurance if it is such a grand idea?
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Well that right there tells me you never read it. They are starting to offer it and the author provided the very reasons WHY it is not offered more.
 
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