health insurance
Found a great (if depressing) article on how frequently health insurance companies cancel policies. In summary, the CEO of Assurant said they only cancel policies of "less than one-half of one percent of people we cover." Which sounds nice and rare and not at all evil... except the conditional probability of losing coverage is actually much, much higher. How much higher? If you file an expensive claim that costs the insurance company most or more than the money you've put into the system, there's about a 10% chance of having your policy canceled. If you're very unlucky and become extremely, desperately sick... you have a 50% chance of losing coverage.
To break down the numbers (taken from U.S. Department of Health & Human Services): more than 85% of the insured population pay in more (usually a lot more) than they take out. 10% pay in approximately what they get out, and only 1% of people get really fucking sick and end up costing the insurance company a lot of money. Those policies are exactly the ones that the insurance companies are most motivated to cancel. So if 1% of the population is really sick and insurance companies only cancel policies on really sick people, then 0.5% of the total population means half of the really sick people are going to lose their coverage.
In personal terms, this woman with health insurance was diagnosed with cancer and told "sooner or later the insurance companies would force you onto Medicaid - either by means of making you unemployable and broke, or by means of you being uninsured and going through any and all assets you have paying medical bills until you are broke and sick enough that you can’t work, and end up on Medicaid."
I don't have a solution, but things are clearly fucked up.
To break down the numbers (taken from U.S. Department of Health & Human Services): more than 85% of the insured population pay in more (usually a lot more) than they take out. 10% pay in approximately what they get out, and only 1% of people get really fucking sick and end up costing the insurance company a lot of money. Those policies are exactly the ones that the insurance companies are most motivated to cancel. So if 1% of the population is really sick and insurance companies only cancel policies on really sick people, then 0.5% of the total population means half of the really sick people are going to lose their coverage.
In personal terms, this woman with health insurance was diagnosed with cancer and told "sooner or later the insurance companies would force you onto Medicaid - either by means of making you unemployable and broke, or by means of you being uninsured and going through any and all assets you have paying medical bills until you are broke and sick enough that you can’t work, and end up on Medicaid."
I don't have a solution, but things are clearly fucked up.