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Umm, yes it does. Do you have car insurance?

 

Yes, and if I get in an accident, they cover me. That's the nature of insurance. If I pay, I can benefit.

 

And if you don't have an accident?

 

Then I'm paying the insurance in case I do, but I can still benefit if I do. The entire premise of insurance is preperation: i.e. that you get it when you don't need it an only pay a little over time. Medicaid, however, makes me pay for a system I'm not using and, probably, never will.

 

No, that is not the entire premise for car insurance, not even close. Car insurance is mandated - you have to have it, whether you benefit from it or not. The premise is that a bunch of people pay into the system, whether you benefit from it or not, for those who need to use it.

And how do you know you will probably never have to use medical insurance? Do you ever plan on getting married? Having children? You will use it.

Edit - Ah, I see you meant "Medicaid." Yes, you may not need Medicaid, which is why I commented earlier that you CAN make an argument that it is "state charity." Even though I don't really consider it that, but it's really a matter of how one defines "charity." But you can make that a valid argument for that.

 

Car insurance is mandatory, but that's not the premise of it. That's an add-on. Additionally, you have the choice to insure your car with anyone you want. You could potentially get a policy with a company that only insures you. And you know what? It'd work the same way. You see, with car insurance, you don't pay for a certain good or service at that moment, but for the insurance that, when the time comes, you will be taken care of.

Lmao, yeah, glad you caught that.

Anyway, if you don't call it 'charity', what do you call it?

1 is a bit iffy.
2 a is much better. 2 b is spot on, though that refers to the institution rather than the act. 2 c is also quite good.
3 a fits.
4 is again a bit iffy (if you consider abandonment by society a judgement, kinda).

 

That is provided that "the time comes," NOG. Some people never use their insurance, which means that they paid for other people's accidents or repairs and never received a benefit. With health insurance you are more than likely to see "the time come."

 

Chandos, it's a stretch of logic to say that I am paying for other people's costs through insurance. It can be made, but it's hardly relevant to the discussion. I get something from paying for insurance: security. If that security is never used, then I've wasted my money, but it's security nonetheless. Yes, the money I pay to the company is used to pay claims, mine or other people's, but that's not the purpose of the money. The purpose of the money is the company's profit. Claims are a necessary cost.


Basically, I pay for other people's bills through insurance in the same way you pay for the cashier's joints, bongs, and court fees by buying a hamburger at McDonald's. The arguement can be made, but only through an indirect route.

 

Really? Explain this then:

Feel free to disagree with this, since it is still an "opinion" of sorts, but since my best friend works in the insurance business (for Farmers, a company I particularly don't like), she feels that this describes how her business works fairly well.

Insurance is really about "distributing risk," in the sense that whether it is government run, or private, the risk of insuring anyone is distibuted among all the policy holder whether they benefit from it or not. The difference is that the government doesn't need to pay for expensive advertising, make a profit large enough to satisfy the greed mongers on Wall Street and pay for an overly expensive administation (bonuses, lavish office suites, corporate country club membeships, etc). But the risk of claims against those paying into the system is what makes it work. You, however, are not seeing it from the side of how the business model works, but from a very personal view of why you would need insurance. That isn't really the larger picture.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance

 

From a business mechanics perspective, I can see that. Then again, from such a perspective, you can say that everything within a society is connected and so, you contributed to the Virginia Tech shooting. From a psychological perspective, it works very differently. Yes, both are valid points, but the business perspective largely ignores the difference between, say, someone going out of their way to help a neighbor in need (without any expectation of repayment) and an insurance model. In most other perspectives, the two are very different behaviors.

As for the benefits of having a government run such a system, I'll agree with you on most (if not all) of them. There are, however, costs. Medicare doesn't offer a lot of different options and yet, even with the relatively few options offered, they still managed to vastly confuse a lot of people. Goverment work is not known for:
1.) flexibility
2.) variability
Free market systems are.

 

I have an impression that the point Chandos is trying to make is that when you get severely sick, as in case you get cancer, odds are your employer will fire you within a year because he pays for you while you don't work, which is bad for you if you're on an employer sponsored health care plan.

Medical costs can quickly add up to six digit sums. If you have to pay for medical costs yourself they can easily eat up your 401k savings. Medical causes were cited by about half of bankruptcy filers in the United States in 2001. As for earnings - according to the financial times working Americans increasingly turn to free government food stamps as their hours and wages erode.

Getting fired can leave you without a job. Unemployment is rising. Many middle class Americans have to pay for a mortgage and have to finance their kid's college education; many younger Americans have to pay back their (considerable) education related loans. Having to fully pay for health insurance then really is tough. Assuming that you're able to work at all after the illness, the big question question is whether you'll find a job. That hasn't become any easier with the recession. It makes eminent sense to address health care in the context of the recession and the to be expected rise in unemployment.

Simply put, if you're out of money, have no job and can't pay your insurance, the insurance will simply, and quite flexibly, cancel the contract and leave you without coverage, after all their market efficiency and profit interest demands so. If you can't pay them, they will not serve you.

But hey, when you had to sell your house, raid your 401k, take your kids out of college and move to a trailer park there is still Medicaid, well, if you're covered. Poverty alone does not necessarily qualify an individual for Medicaid. It is estimated that approximately 60 percent of poor Americans are not covered by Medicaid. This meets a demand.

On a related note, the variability and number of options, and the greater choice when compared to the US that the German state sponsored health care system offers, suggest that the assertion of superior variability in a purely private health insurance is not persuasive.

 

Only if you have an competitive free market, which I would argue that the American health insurance sector does not. From where I'm standing free market health care in general constitutes as a market failure.

 

Ragusa, those are good points, and reasons I favor at least two major changes over the current system:
1.) Kill the job-related insurance. It's a bad idea. Sure, it offers some extra incentive, and yes, it puts more of the cost of insurance on businesses, but it also ties you to the job and puts your insurance at risk if you can't work.
2.) Legislate that cancelation of a policy only protects the company from covering future unrelated issues. If you have cancer and can't work and loose insurance, the insurance company should still pay for the cance treatment because, you know what, you were insured when you got (and were diagnosed with) cancer!

Morgoroth, I'll also agree with your point, and I would like to see some competition forced into the system (though I'm not sure how to do that). Alternatively, limited regulation can preserve much of that even without competition. My problem with the Senate bill is that it's vastly excessive regulation.

 

Ragusa - I think more than that has happened: The American pretense of the moral high-ground, the "Christian Nation," founded as a "beacon of light" is completely gone out the window, once and for all. To be sure when the country was founded there was a notion that America could be a better place for anyone, of any class, than the realm of despotic monarchs, in which the poor and unfortunates were treated no better than stray dogs, and were caught in a brutal class system. Now it appears Europe, and maybe even the East, are racing ahead of America in regards to how their cultures treat all their citizens, particularly the sick and less fortunate, rather than just fawning and groveling up the rich and powerful. Is there a health care problem for the sick? Oh, the rich need a tax cut then.

As a culture, we have changed dramatically over the last few decades. There are very deep changes in the fabric of our society which can no longer be undone. The nastiness and cruelty we have seen in the health care reform debate has brought this into sharp focus. But Americans will continue to delude themselves with their notions of health care superiority, despite not having any real benchmarks against which to measure anything. And the more that this is noticed by the rest of the world, the more Americans are going to react with emotion and scron, rather than self-examination and reflection, which goes beyond our mere "image" in the world, but our inablility to solve our problems in a rational manner.

You are absolutely right that people who suffer a major illness are in danger from more than just the disease. They risk losing their jobs, their medical coverage, their homes, their retirement, just about everything they have worked for. We saw the images of the woman in her wheelchair being heckled by the opponents of health care reform who are sitting there carping about "their rights." If you asked them they could not even tell you what those "rights" are. But they were filled with scorn and resentment for a helpless woman.

Oh, and least I forget our beloved free market principles: Code for how to turn a political "bribe" from a lobbyist into "good" government policy and how to be rewarded with taxpayer dollars for fraud and incompetence. If we yell, "The Free Market" loud enough and long enough, someone may hear us as we are sinking.

---------- Added 9 hours, 27 minutes and 30 seconds later... ----------

Doesn't it figure? After all this "reform" guess who would just love this? I wish I ran a business where people would be fined for not buying from me. How freaking sorry are these "Dems?" I told you guys the only difference between these guys and the Repulicans is the spelling....

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32733321/ns/politics-health_care_reform/

 

Chandos, just go into car insurance.

 

Do you know what the fine is for driving without auto insurance? It's like 150.00 here. People get busted all the time for that, but for some it's cheaper than paying the insurance.

 

Yeah, but they're still fined for not buying from you. Well, not *you* in particular, but...

Anyway, actually, this fits with some of the existing Dem plans. The House version is mandated coverage, though that's a gov't plan, so it's not like you can not have it. And yes, this is a part of the reason I don't want Congress meddling in health insurance.

 

NOG - The government plan was only supposed to be 60.00 a month (like Medicare). Most everyone could afford that - the insurance companies will charge much more, I'm sure.

 

I thought we were talking about mandating health coverage, not it's cost?

 

The insurance companies can charge pretty much what they want. Take a look at the link. That's what this debate is largely about. A government plan like Medicare would be more affordable, and make the insurance companies more price competitive. They don't want that because now they can charge what they want, and there is nothing you can do about it.