Health Care Reform

[snailprincess]

I think it can pretty much be assumed that the current push for health care reform will fail. We might get a couple token bills out of the deal, but I'm pretty sure nothing substantive will change. It was actually one line in an article in The Economist (I know, I know, Ooohhh, I read the economists, oohhh) that sort of summed it up pretty well

Comments

[triath]

Yup. I had no idea until I had to pay for my own health care while I was in Japan (I know, I know, woe is me). It's expensive! And I was only getting catastrophic care and I have a healthy record.

Seeing the price of COBRA (the same price that your employer pays) is really eye-opening.

[camlost]

I recall that we're paying ~$30/mo, and that employer is covering 90%, which means that at my decently large, incredibly young company is getting a rate of $300/mo on health care.

A back of the envelope calculating at 2200b[1] with 300m people is ~$600 a month. That's on par per capita with rent or car, and easily more than groceries.

Of course, the "open" market has the problem that it primarily gets the rejects from the employer system, which means that "insurers" have no real incentive to pick these people up.

[1] 2007 $7421/capita/yr http://www.kaiseredu.org/topics_im.asp?imID=1&parentID=61&id=358

[bobbzman]

I really would have liked to know if the "benefit dollars" deducted from my paycheck at City of Hope represented the real cost or not. In this case, however, the numbers didn't seem small, they seemed astronomically large... substantially higher than I was quoted for an individual policy under the same provider (maybe because I'm cheaper to insure than the rest of the employees?).

[snailprincess]

It could be that your cheaper to insurance than the average employee. It could also be the policy you quoted wasn't actually as good as the one you receive at work.

[bobbzman]

Or a combination of both. I'm cheaper to insure because I don't require certain coverage (pre-natal care, etc.).

Insurance is a total confusopoly. I wish it were easier to compare prices and assess the value of policies.

[sillygoosegirl]

You're probably right... the only reason I know what my health insurance really costs is because I've done some looking into quitting my job and living on savings while my spouse does the same. (Personally, I think this is a totally legitimate use of our hard earned money, but apparently it makes me an un-American lazy communist.) COBRA would be pretty expensive, and you can only buy it for so long, and because of the choices my employer has made for me, it only covers me for catastrophic care when I am outside of Dane County (which is fine for so long as I live here, but considering I wouldn't live here if it wasn't for the job...). If I buy my own insurance on the "open" market, not only will it be outragiously expensive, there's not really any guarentee that they will actually agree to keep coving me if I get sick, and then if they don't I will have this pre-existing condition that would be hard to get coverage for. I hate the way it shackles us to our jobs. I hate the way it will prevent us from having the freedom to work two

[snailprincess]

Yup, I agree with pretty much everything you said. The only way to get good health insurance is basically to work for a company that provides it. That shackles you too that company. It made a certain amount of sense 50 years ago when people tended to work in the same job forever. But that's not really what we have anymore.

Also, costs will continue to spiral out of if no one even sees the real cost of the care they recieve.

[bonboard]

I think part of the problem is that people generally have never run an insurance company

[snailprincess]

My point isn't so much that people are ignorant, it's that they don't ever really feel the cost of their health insurance. If a company decided it was going to start paying for our auto insurance and charging as tiny fraction of what that coverage cost, on some intellectual level we might understand that we were still paying for it, but perceptually, it would still feel like a 'benefit' even if the price actually went up, unless we actually saw our pay decrease immediately.

What I'm saying is that well all 'know' our health care is expensive, and intellectually we think we ought to do something about that, but very few of us actually feel that expense. Reform is almost always painful in some way, so when we actually start asking people bear that pain their going to balk because for most people, the pain of our current system is only theoretical.

I'm not advocating for or against the currently proposed plan, I'm just saying until people actually feel the system is broken rather than just sort of intellectually think it is, we're

[snailprincess]

Oh, I meant to say something about the 'socialized' medicine. I didn't really mean it from an economic sense, however on some level, getting insurance through an employer has a lot in common with socialized medicine. You, the direct receiver of the benefit have very little choice in what benefit you receive (you are probably given a selection of a few options) and you do not pay that cost directly. The costs are spread out over the entire group, the young and healthy essentially subsidizing the old or the sick. There are a great deal of government regulations in place telling companies what form insurance they provide has to cover and it has to cover everyone.

If we all worked for the same company, it would be identical to government paid health care. Obviously we don't, so it's not the same, but there are similarities, especially given that some companies are quite large, and it's not exactly easy to move from job to job.

[bonboard]

Yeah, they were talking on NPR this morning about the situation in Germany, France, and Japan, where there are (still successful) private insurance companies, but that they're much more heavily regulated. For example, they must pay every claim that gets filed, and must pay it within like 5 days. In the U.S., private insurers instead hire armies of adjusters to process and deny as many claims as they can, because a claim not paid goes straight to the bottom line as profit (well, okay, top line as revenue, but you get the point). In addition, in the countries above, you can't be dropped from a plan arbitrarily (by law), and you have the right to switch from plan to plan, provider to provider, at virtually any time. On the down side, there are fewer payers, as few as (I think they said) 200 in Germany, vs. tens of thousands in the U.S