Nationalize it!
I work for an insurance company, so perhaps my perspective is colored a bit by that, but here’s my question: why are private enterprises allowed to offer insurance? Shouldn’t this be a government function alone?
Stay with me. The problem with the current healthcare insurance situation translates to all types of insurance, if you think about it. Insurance companies make money in two ways:
- By taking your premiums and investing them, such that even if they have to pay out more than you’ve paid in, they made a profit on the investment. (This is how most life insurance policies work.)
- By simply taking in more than they pay out, which is a big problem.
It’s a big problem because, as anyone can see, it behooves the insurance company to deny all the claims it can. This results in companies putting all kinds of fine print in the contracts, so they can weasel out of paying you. The more egregious companies deny even legitimate claims, forcing you to fight them to receive your benefits, knowing that many customers won’t bother to question it.
In the case of a healthcare insurance organization, it achieves its greatest profit by letting people get sick and die without treatment. If you get sick, and are denied a claim, you could try and switch to a different insurance company; vote with your feet, as the saying goes. Except now that you’re already sick, the new insurance company says you have a pre-existing condition and denies you insurance, or worse yet accepts your premiums and denies your claim.
I’ll say it again: insurance companies achieve their greatest profits by letting people die.
In the case of a public plan, though, that wouldn’t be a problem. The government doesn’t care about turning a profit. Politicians will complain if the plan loses too much money, but in the end if a program is popular no politician will vote to remove it. (See also: Medicare, which is the sort of “socialized medicine” that right-wing politicians hate, but which they’ll never get rid of because seniors like to vote.) So there’s no incentive to deny your claim because you already had cancer when you signed up, or because you accidentally mispelt your PCP’s name on the paperwork. They may haggle with providers over rates, and you may have a deductible, but they’ll approve almost anything.
Oddly enough, I think it’s even more egregious that no one offers anything like this in the area of auto insurance. I can’t think of a state that doesn’t require you to have auto insurance in order to drive, but do any offer a public insurance option? (I honestly don’t know, and am too lazy to look it up. (I am not a very good journalist.) Delaware does not, to the best of my knowledge. Seems like the kind of thing California or Massachusetts would do, though.)
I guess putting all insurance in government hands would put insurance companies out of business, but, frankly, screw ’em.
