Update: (re: Calling for Help)

[pocketnaomi]

OK, first let me say a huge thank you to everybody who contributed valuable advice as well as just plain sympathy and good wishes about the pile of unbelievable crap my health insurance company has decided to pile on my head. I've spent the last two days frantically researching and calling everyone on the planet who could possibly be able to help

Comments

[pocketnaomi]

Yes. Which is really frustrating when the only reason you bought car insurance was in case you got into an accident; you could easily enough pay for the oil changes yourself. Of course, so can they, which is why they don't mind doing those, but object to anything that's actually expensive.

But since the whole point of insurance is so that, if you don't need large expenses, they get your money, but if you do need large expenses, you get their money, this constitutes flat-out cheating in my book.

The problem is, they have to cheat. They're doing it more and worse than they really need to, resulting in astronomical profits instead of merely reasonable ones, but the reality is that people know so much about their own medical state now that they can accurately predict, to a large extent, whether they'll need someone else to pay their medical costs, and what kind of insurance will get them that. When medical science was poor enough that people just didn't know, they had to buy insurance just in case... and then the premiums from people who didn't need the care paid for the people who did, and a little left over for profit. When people know pretty clearly whether they need it or not, though, there isn't a big enough pool of people who don't turn out to need the care after all, and the only way for the companies to turn a profit is to cheat the people who do need it out of the coverage they paid for.

This is not a sustainable system, and it's why, IMO, we need to go to single-payer. The insurance model is based on an outdated situation, and it's as faulty as trying to make money off a blackjack game in which your opponents could see all the cards before they were turned up. The only way to win then is cheat. But cheating sick people out of the care they need and had been faithfully paying for is just... well... sick.