View original post1. Health care providers must post clear and easily understood price schedules to allow people to compare prices (when they have the luxury of doing so). The Federal government sets a maximum profit margin for all procedures, drugs, and physical products, which the states then oversee. This would not keep a doctor from setting any hourly rate but would apply to costs by clinics and hospitals for specific procedures. Insurance coverage must be disclosed to patients prior to procedures that are considered elective or preventive.
Under the current system, people have no incentive to make economic decisions about their health care and in most cases no ability to do so. And people largely have no idea how much their insurance costs, nor cared how those costs had been increasing until employers started shifting more of it to them.
View original post2. Insurance companies are not regulated by the states, but by the Federal government, allowing sales across state lines. Insurance companies are also subject to maximum profit margins (just like utility companies and other monopolies for basic services).
Agree, but the employees of 50 different state departments of insurance aren't going to take that lying down.
View original post3. Insurance is decoupled from employment, so everyone must go out and buy their own policy. People are allowed to buy policies that don't cover issues they don't care about or have moral objections about. No policy can be sold that is not for an individual or a nuclear family unit (spouses and minor dependents to age 25). People who qualify for Medicaid can still buy Medicaid instead of private insurance or (perhaps) we just replace it with vouchers for private insurance.
This only works combined with your final suggestion (mandatory insurance), so that the current group rate phenomenon basically extends across the whole pool (country) instead of separate pockets.
Very needed, and I would add reform of the pharmaceutical patent system to this.
View original post5. Insurance is mandatory, as with ObamaCare. Although I don't like it I realize that the system won't work if healthy people don't pay. And health is like a lottery anyway. No one knows who will get cancer, or be in car accidents, or have freak accidents, or live healthy and die peacefully in their sleep at 98.
There's really no way around this as long as it's true that health insurance is necessary to provide health care (and I don't see that changing). It used to be that the cost structure was such that people as a rule could pay what they had to for what they needed when they needed it, and could reasonably pay off an emergency or unforeseen diagnosis without bankrupting themselves. That is no longer possible systematically, and only works individually because providers are making up the difference elsewhere.
- 09/03/2017 03:41:59 AM
448 Views
- 14/03/2017 03:03:34 PM
449 Views