re: OT: Corona Panic 2020

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Have you ever heard of root cause problem solving?

Expanding the market place isn't a bad thing. But it isn't solving a root cause to the problems with insurance.

1) insurance should be ala carte. This complicates shopping for insurance and it makes an environment where people can make bad decisions for themselves. But an individual should be able to buy a plan that fits their needs. Want more coverages? Opt in and pay more premium. Right now, the government is picking one size fits all plans making other options illegal and punishable by fines. Thanks big government.

2) if you want larger health pools, you have to get more people to want to buy. You do that by getting more affordable plans. And that is accomplished with less coverage options. You could actually institute real underwriting into health insurance to make it more affordable. Charging smokers more means that nonsmokers pay less. It is a crazy concept, I know. Let an insurance company actuary risk so that the marketplace can buy a plan that fits their needs.

Beyond that, you are attacking costs in place by healthcare itself. There is more that can be done to maintain fair pricing practices on that front than can be done on the insurance front (again, insurance is a passthrough of costs. It is no more than a conduit).

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Nobody is arguing against actuarial health pooling. That's the system we had prior to the ACA.

If someone were a smoker, for instance, they weren't tossed into a health pool of all smokers, they were put into one of any random pool of people, but they were "rated up" and had to pay a higher premium.

This is how life insurance still currently works.

If someone had cancer or diabetes or asthma or high cholesterol or they were morbidly obese, or any series of possible ailments, depending on the severity of any of these, they could either be rated up and have to pay more, or if it was severe enough and over certain thresholds they were deemed too high a risk and maybe outright declined.

But that was what we had before the ACA, and the insurance companies would then "spread the risk" by placing these people in pools with large amounts of healthy low risk people.

YES, we want that back, of course. But all we're saying is it would also be great if those risk pools could be expanded even further, and the competition from company vs company and plan design vs plan design could as well.

We're not actually arguing against anything you're saying. We're simply talking about supplementing and combining all the concepts.


And then, after we do this, those people who are declared too high of risk to insure, lets figure out how to help them too. Expand Medicare for them or give them access to the VA or something.



I also want newer systems thrown into the mix. Like subscription-based preventative/general care.

Local doctors and clinics and even hospitals start offering monthly subscriptions where people pay maybe $50/month (or whatever) directly to them, and then you get certain services offered to you for your general care, like checkups, physicals, obgyn for women, generic Rx... non-specialty/non-catastrophic type things.

Then people who do that can supplement with high deductible catastrophic health insurance policies in nationwide expanded risk pools from a choice of dozens of competing insurance companies. And those policies use the old actuarial health/risk rating system.


We have to get out from under the crap we have now, though. It's still being affected by the ACA. The mandates and penalties were removed, but the general rules are still in place, and they suck.