Health Insurance Does Not Insure Health
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No one in the United States can be denied health care because of their inability to pay. That’s just the way it is. Health Insurance reform – any reform – is not going to give one single person health care they couldn’t already receive.
Will it make health care better, higher quality? No, health insurance doesn’t insure health, it only insures financial stability of the person covered.
So will it make it cheaper? Not if you cover Pre-existing conditions. Forcing companies to cover pre-existing conditions will only serve to increase costs to everyone. Insurance companies exist to make money. That’s it. They must make a profit or break even or they will be forced to close. No company in the United States pays taxes or even has a single business expense – they pass that cost onto the consumer. You force the insurance company to cover things they lose money on and they will be forced to cover that extra expense by raising rates.
Want to make Health Insurance cheaper? Treat health insurance like car insurance.
Allow people to buy the coverage they want a la carte – if they only want insurance to cover emergencies let them buy it. If they want insurance to cover everything and their hangnails, make them pay more for it. Don’t force single men to carry insurance for mammograms and don’t force single women to carry insurance for testicular cancer (real law – forget what state, I think Wisconsin).
Allow people to buy insurance across state lines – There are some 1200-1400 health insurance companies in the United States, but you only have access to the ones in your home state. Each of the 50 states has their own regulations as to what insurance companies must cover (like the example above), limiting what small companies can do and creates localized monopolies. Think of the competition that could be created to hammer prices down if they all had to compete against each other.
Allow small businesses to form medical co-operatives – Obama himself has said he doesn’t like how small businesses pay more for insurance than large companies. But that’s just capitalism – economies of scale. Big companies get better rates because they have more employees and more bargaining power – and whether you think differently or not, you do not want this to change. By allowing small businesses to form co-operatives, and limiting it logically (I say within the same county), multiple small businesses can pool their employees and be able to talk down the price of coverage for their employees.
And after all that, the Insurance Companies would probably cover pre-existing conditions just because competition would warrant it – and it’d be cheaper than it would have ever been otherwise.
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