DaveH;204915 wrote:
Now that the voting is over, I don't mind taking Jason's thread on a tangent.
It seems most people think we "need" insurance. IMO, insurance is a huge part of the problem! What insurance does is add a huge cost. The insurance companies have to make a profit (typically not a small profit) plus you have to pay all the people who work at the insurance company processing claims, etc. Next, the doctors and hospitals have to charge more because now they have to pay accountants and paper-pushgers, etc to process all the freaking paperwork. So you think about all the money you are wasting paying all this overhead to a insurance company when you could put that money in the bank and save/earn interest and pay your medical bills out of that money.
Next, the price of going to the doctor has gone through the roof... why is that? A large part of it is because of insurance. If you have insurance, you don't care what things cost because insurance is paying for it. Heck, most people with insurance don't even have a clue what things cost. So basically doctors/hospitals charge whatever they want (within a little bit of reason). IMO insurance is a large part of why the average Joe without insurance can't pay their bill.
Whew, end of rant.
Heh, nice rant Dave. And you are right about a good portion of it.
Insurance is nothing more than a bet that in a given amount of time you won't get sick. They basically give you odds and if you "beat" those odds, insurance pays off for you in a very good way. If you don't (and most people won't) need insurance, it is a very wasteful investment...until you do need it. Of course, if you invested wisely, you could turn the amount of money that you "invested" into insurance into a very decent return on investment, at which point you would still be money ahead. But since most people don't invest the amount of what insurance costs them when they are uninsured, it is the "safe" bet to take the insurance.....just in case.
However, the uninsured often pay more than the insured do in the event of a doctors visit (worked both selling health insurance and have worked in the insurance/claims/collection dept of clinics in the past.) Insurance companies often negotiate pricing that is lower than the standard rate. Companies like BCBS have very good negotiating abilities as they are a very well known insurer that pays their bills on time, every time and has a LOT of patients that are covered, so they take the walmart approach and get volume discounts from hospitals/clinics/etc... Discounts that you and I would never receive.
However, they also pay for tests that may not be done on non-insured patients....at least not right away. This is partly why insurance goes up all the time. The other problem is because everyone runs to the doctor at the onset of every little sneeze/sniffle/scrape/bruise because they know they will only have to pay $15 as a co-pay. If we stopped doing that, insurance would probably not increase so fast.
