@josephinelee
I wrote this several years ago... [Long Post]
#Insurance is about pooling resources and sharing risk. A simple thought experiment will help illustrate why “health insurance” is a misnomer.
Consider a group of one thousand homeowners who are worried about house fires. They band together and create an insurance pool for protection against such losses. If homes are worth $100,000 and there is one fire per year, annually they would have to chip in $100 each. Fortunately the risky event is rare, so the cost of insurance is low.
Compare this with #HealthInsurance (which is actually insurance against illness). We have the same thousand people, of which half (500) consume an average of $10,000 of healthcare services each year ($5M).
#Illness is NOT a rare event and the annual premium jumps to $5,000 per person! Many of the younger, healthier people ask why they should be paying for somebody else’s infirmity? They withdraw from the pool and premiums skyrocket. Eventually the pool collapses and those who actually need care loose their coverage. In some cases financial ruin ensues. The U.S. is the only major society in the world where Medical Bankruptcy is not only possible, but common!
The key difference is that almost everyone will utilize healthcare services at some point in their lives. The insurance model breaks down under these circumstances. We are no longer sharing #risk but rather #sharing #cost.
This is expected—a feature, not a bug. It stems from the #industrialization of #medicine in a #capitalist environment. #Capitalism seeks profit as its major goal, regardless of other outcomes. "Outcomes" that include life, death, and disability! Once the practice of medicine becomes a business, my Father [a radiologist] once opined, "We can #lie, #cheat, and #steal with the rest of them."
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