Thursday, November 13, 2008

"So I’ve been readingskimming through the health care plan proposed by Senator Max Baucus of Montana. ": No, Not Me. I Scan. It Sounds Better.

Here's 124 Monkeys, I now make it 125, on the Baucus health plan:

"So I’ve been readingskimming through the health care plan proposed by Senator Max Baucus of Montana. It’s been getting some good press lately, and is seen as something that has a good possibility of becoming the health care reform everyone is so desperately looking for. It addresses lots of the common complaints about health reform bills and includes an individual mandate but lets people buy at “pool” rather than individual rates.

It doesn’t answer my main problem with every single health care reform I’ve seen. What exactly is the benefit the insurance companies are providing to consumers? I mean honestly, what the hell is their justification for existing as private profit seeking companies?OK, theoretically, insurance companies exist as a way for people to pool their risk, be it of early death, illness, theft, or random property damage (fire, flood, earthquake). As such, they’re fine. They take in only those who want to hedge against their risk and are willing to pay a premium to do so. The insurance companies mainly catered to the well to do (i.e. those who had the most to risk losing and also had the excess of wealth to pay out a little bit to insure the rest of it. Insurance was for the rich, it turned a profit and covered its losses. Only those who were willing to pay for it had it. Everyone was happy-ish and the system worked for the well off."

At least he skimmed it. I had a hell of a time downloading it, then couldn't even skim it. Here's the end of his post:

"If we truly want national risk management from our insurance companies then we have to make them truly national. That means one pool for everyone that admits everyone and doesn’t discriminate based on risk factors. Yes, this system is somewhat unfair to those with low-risk profiles. And it can potentially lead to less risk averse living. It’s not perfect. So what? It’s better than what we have now."

I think that I agree. My main objection is to the current mess we have now, and all these horrible plans to tinker with it, like the Baucus plan. For all I know it's better, but I'm pretty sure someone's going to find out that it's going haywire somewhere down along the line. I hope that I'm wrong.

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