Why Have Medical Insurance?

you had a pre existing condition you could be charged more for one year an d after a year of being covered your payments would be lowered as if you ha d no pre existing condition.

Apparently old age is a pre-existing condition, and, although not denied, t he insurance rates are outta sight about five years before qualifying for M edicare. The new plan is not well thought out. The Republicans did not writ e it, insurance industry shills wrote it for them.

This sounds like an exaggeration, but I know someone who was a salesman for orthopedic implants. He says he sold implants to doctors who had never done the procedure before and he had to be in the operating room to show them how to do it. Even that is a rosy picture compared to some of his stories. He talked about having to brow beat a doctor into going ahead with the surgery after opening the patient and wanting to back out.

In reality there is very little quality control in the medical profession. Doctors don't like to rat each other out and someone on the outside has a *huge* burden of proof to meet to take action against a doctor. I have a number of horror stories that I witnessed first hand.

It won't happen in my lifetime, but someday we will stop regarding doctors as magicians and start the medical profession the same way we treat other professions.

That makes little sense. Companies are buying medical insurance now, why should that change? Let them pay for the cost of medical care for their employees under any new system. It should have no impact on the company's profitability unless they were providing very little care before (like UPS who dropped family members from coverage citing the ability for them to get coverage under the ACA).

Like "software engineering" professionals? :(

I strongly suspect the points you raise can be found anywhere, with analogous behaviour in more or less any profession.

Mensch ist mensch. People are people.

That is not unlikely to be true. A friend worked in a non-profit related to the outdoors and human physiology (think surviving cold and heat). Some decades ago there was a heat wave across the country that killed thousands in the US. An outcry forced Congress to have hearings on it and my friend worked for a Senate committee to write a report about it recommending approaches to prevent so many deaths again. This resulted in the surcharge on your electric bill to pay for poor people having A/C and heat at times of extreme temperatures as well as programs to train utilities in human physiology and development of utility programs to find and assist people in distress.

My friend wrote a huge percentage of that report, but the names on it are all Senators.

There are standards for every profession that involves significant risk to populations. If you are a software engineer for life critical systems, you have many, many rules and regulations you must adhere to. Doctors don't. They get to do what they are comfortable with and have very little accountability.

Gasoline. What a novel idea.

People with property that might be lost? Another novel idea! How about they arm themselves in case the cops can't get there in time, too!

How about we tax people with homes who might lose them? Maybe they could even buy fire extinguishers in case the fire department doesn't happen to be there when the fire starts. Maybe they can even buy

If it's economically feasible, sure, why not. Meanwhile, they measure trash by volume. We get one dumper a week. Need more, buy the services of another. Have more than that, even, buy a roll-off or make other plans. All of these options are available. Isn't capitalism neat!

I'm worried about the cost to me, of you deciding that you'd rather be a bum that contribute to society. If you want to be a bum, so be it, but go all the way.

Nonsense. If you rely on the fire department, the structure *will* be a total loss. The fire department, like the police department, is there to *contain* the loss, not prevent it.

Utter nonsense.

More nonsense.

What a bunch of crap!

Because it's expensive. If they're being taxed to pay for single-payer insurance, why pay twice?

Why in hell would they pay for something that someone else is picking up. You're loony!

up

rom

if you had a pre existing condition you could be charged more for one year and after a year of being covered your payments would be lowered as if you had no pre existing condition.

d, the insurance rates are outta sight about five years before qualifying f or Medicare. The new plan is not well thought out. The Republicans did not write it, insurance industry shills wrote it for them.

ACA was written by a group pulled from industry, notably Elizabeth Fowler, Wellpoint VP, who all went back to industry after the job was done.

Process claims, and control cost of claims.

Insurers have a strong incentive to perform those functions as efficiently as possible--any savings directly benefits the insurers.

Originally, health insurance companies assumed your financial risk of having an expensive medical condition.

Today insurance is being used to finance nearly every trivial medical transaction. That adds a good deal of overhead and moral hazard to the system, increasing cost, and removing the normal consumers' price-pressure from providers.

That's true. That would be a conflict of interest.

Cheers, James Arthur

They already pay about double. Statistically.

But figuring out new ways of getting other people to pay for your over-priced care simply encourages the continued over-pricing of care. That's watering the tree, rather than getting to the root of the problem.

Cheers, James Arthur

But it's not true. His secretary pays exactly the same capital gains rate that he does. (Possibly lower, actually.)

Cheers, James Arthur

And Trumps wishes to fix that no? The cap on corporate taxes will be only 15%. Did you miss that somehow?

Uh, isn't your care at the same price as everyone else? Why is it *my* over-priced care?

So you want to lower the pay of doctors and regulate the charges of hospitals? I can't think of any other way to lower medical costs without compromising or denying care to someone. Oh, I guess we could eliminate insurance and just require everyone to pay for their own care. That would be totally in line with what you said.

Secretary isn't paid in capital gains, it's called salary and the tax rate is *much* higher. I can't believe you would call Buffett a liar.

It should be zero. Corporations don't pay taxes!

His point is that it's _all_ overpriced because of the meddling *you* like.

You lefties refuse to read. He's been perfectly clear (for months and months and months).

And should be. But different rates for different activities a different question, isn't it?

Buffett and his secretary pay the same rates on investments, and the same rate on wages.(*) And Buffett pays a *lot* more in total tax.

(*) If anything his secretary pays a lower rate, as he's liable for Obamacare's surcharge on investment income.

Buffett gave half his fortune to charity, tax-free. Evidently, Buffett would rather *give his money away* than pay 15% capital gains to the federal government. And, apparently Buffett believes this will do more good for society, so much so that, when it comes to doing something good for society, Buffett prefers donating 100% over paying 15% to the federal government.

Cheers, James Arthur

Lowering the corporate tax has no effect on the individual income tax share paid by "the rich," except possibly to increase that share substantially--thanks to progressive brackets--if they take more out of the corporations as personal income.

You're being too literal. That was a collective "you," not personal.

I didn't say that, and it doesn't follow.

My point was that dumping money on something that's over-priced, increasing demand, does not cause the thing to cost less. Looking for other people to pay for it doesn't avoid that essential truth.

Things cost less when people are motivated to improve efficiency, usually because consumers and competition demand it. We don't have that in medicine.

Cheers, James Arthur

It turned out to be primarily age-related - children don't start paying taxes until they get a job,

I'm not finding the numbers are counting children. Are you making that up?

the retired don't pay much tax on their pensions,

A lot of them pay nothing.

and mothers with kids tend not to be in paid work.

If they are not paid they are not part of the workforce.

You will need to find a source for what you say, it wasn't very many years ago that 30% of workers had what they call a negative income tax, meaning we gave them money, taxed from others as a reward for working. EITC.

"The top 1 percent, pay 43.6 percent of all the federal individual income tax in the United States, Market Watch reports." Seems like the bottom 50% might want to throw a little love their way.

On Monday, May 8, 2017 at 6:08:05 PM UTC-7, bitrex wrote: ...

Health insurance companies don't seem to be that efficient with about 20-25% gross margin:

And their executives are not poorly paid either -

All this comes out of the insurance premiums.

The UK NHS comes in at about 14% which is deemed too high.

kevin