posted
Also, you seem to have a very bizarre idea about how economics works. You talk about "big businesses" paying insurance instead of the tax payer. I don't think you're following the path of the money quite right -- every dollar a business spends comes from a tax payer, typically more than one, in the form of lower pay for workers and higher prices on goods and services.
What's more, since health care is, under our current system, pretty much all over the place (with a few exceptions), the cost of health care is already born by every single taxpayer.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
If they had universal groups I might feel more sympathy for insurance companies. But they cherry pick (workers are inherently more healthy in general than retired and unemployed people).
Plus, almost everyone with input into insurance plans today has no incentive as either a patient (the customer) or health care provider (the vendor). And current tax policy subsidizes this anti-market aspect of the system.
What we have is ludicrous.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
What's particularly amusing about this is that there are routes to a more socialistic system that don't eliminate insurance companies wholesale, though do of course require major changes, and are also more capitalist than the current system -- the standardization of basic lower levels of insurance coverage combined with the removal of the necessary coupling of insurance groups with employers combined with the creation of various much larger, densely overlapping insurance groups that insurance companies may bid on coverage for competitively (likely based on various levels of locality, certain types of employment among the professionals, and a few other sorts of things).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote: This is just an educated guess, but I am guessing the therapy that your doctor put your son on was a brand-name ear suspension, and a brand-name antiobiotic. All the brand-name ear suspensions retail for well over a hundred dollars alone. This is because they are fluoroquinolones based on drugs like Cipro and Floxin that are also well over a hundred dollars per course
He's on Ciprodex and Omnicef. Of course I would have paid more for him not to have a ruptured eardrum, and I certainly think his doc did all he could. I think my issue is with the insurance company. We still paid for over a third of the cost, and three years ago we wouldn't have.
Posts: 2711 | Registered: Mar 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
My preference is such an overlapping group of insurers and subsidies based on income - kind of like food stamps.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Income would be another nice method of grouping, yes. I like multiple methods of grouping because it prevents certain sorts of selection among insurance companies -- for instance, if just by income, the lower income strata could become occupied by "ghetto" insurance companies that provided the least care possible. But if there are several orthogonal criteria covering everyeone, then that can't happen.
Oh, and if you've got insurance, you get to go to any licensed medical facility.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I agree. The insurance company chose to stick romanylass with the tab, and many insurance plans are like glorified savings plans, especially when it comes to prescription "benefits". I will do whatever it takes to make one of my customers happy or to help with an expensive drug. Yet I dispensed one rx yesterday that was $12,000. The patient is on medicaid, and paid nothing. Is this fair? No. But until people get fed up enough to take action this is only going to worsen.
Just make sure if you do take action you apply it in the right direction. Which reminds me of a long and uninteresting analogy between cars and drug prices.
Would you go to the auto parts store to complain about how expensive your car was? No. They only sell parts to fix your car. The automobile manufacturers set the prices, dealerships turn a profit, and ancillary businesses profit from the auto industry.
So don't blame your drugstore for the price of a prescription. We simply are buying low, and selling high, with a profit margin that is ever-dwindling. It is scary actually.
posted
Don't blame the drug store a bit, don't worry.
I don't even blame the insurance companies, or the drug companies, really. I blame an overall system, and a reform of that system will lead to changes in things related to it (for the better, I think).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I don't blame the drug store. If anyone I blame the corporation my husband works for whom for the last four years has charged us more and covered us less for insurance.
Posts: 2711 | Registered: Mar 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
It's hard to blame them, too. We had insurance go up 50% in one year - that was the best price available after shopping around.
Over the 9 years we offered insurance, prices went up on us about 25% per year on average.
Big corporations can do better, but they're still facing double digit growth or close to it most years.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Sadly, this all comes down to money. Insurance companies gambled on the HMO market undergoing a darwinian extinction in which there would be few survivors resulting from lowball predatory pricing of benefits, especially in the 1990s. Evidently more survived than anticipated and enrollees are paying the difference from some silly scheme to make rich insurance companies richer. Their short-term gamble failed and we are paying their gambling debts.
Posts: 1870 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I certainly don't blame the drugstore either nor do I ever get pissy with the pharmacists when my meds are expensive. They're really good about double checking when a scanned med turns out to be wicked expensive when I'm about to pay for it.
It really does seem so strange that insurance is so closely wrapped up in fulltime work.
Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
| IP: Logged |
quote:Florida Power discovered a while back that they were paying Blue Cross and Blue Shield more each year for insurance than their employees actually spent on healthcare. So FP kept BCBS on to handle the paperwork and began to pay for the healthcare themselves.
That's basically how insurance works. A company is paid a sum more then they pay out, total, in order to provide uniform coverage across a population over time. Now, they make some money off of investments and the like, but I bet you'd be hard pressed to find an insurance company that (quite reasonably) didn't pay out for healthcare more than they were paid in premiums.
This is particularly understandable because there are overheads such as paperwork. Its only when the difference becomes excessive that there are problems. Such as nowadays.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
