Mythusmage Opines

You know who Bernie Madoff was, he was the guy who ran a multi-billion dollar ponzi scheme. Hell, one day I expect people will call his scam a “madoff”. A pyramid so audacious a billion dollars is the lower end of the con. But, as audacious as Bernie was, we are now seeing a madoff that makes him look like a petty thief.

What con is this? The health insurance business. What’s worse, our government is going to make our participation is the fraud mandatory.

What makes health insurance a ponzi, a pyramid, a madoff? Explaining the first two is simple, health insurance needs a growing contributor base to earn money for payouts. In this case payouts are made possible by a large contributor base, a contributor base that for the most part will not ask for payouts of their own. So long as income is greater than expenses, the scheme stays afloat. What makes it a madoff is the sheer size of it. We are dealing with billions of dollars here; billions coming in, not so many billions going out.

But in order for this to work health insurance companies need to do two things, minimize expenses, and maximize income. You do the first by being stingy with the outlays. You do the second by recruiting contributors; that is, customers.

There’s a problem here, people who don’t want to be contributors because they see no benefit to be gained from being insured. You need to convince them they need insurance, but as long as they are for the most part young and healthy, you’re not going to talk them into it. How to deal with this?

The government has what they think is the perfect answer, make coverage mandatory. You will get health insurance, or you will be subject to fines and jail time. Once such legislation is enacted the problem then becomes one of enforcing it. Will people be required to carry insurance cards? Will they be required to produce those cards upon demand? What about counterfeit cards and fraudulent operations?

And what about criminal prosecutions? The prosecution of people who refuse to get health insurance? How much effort will we be putting into criminal prosecutions? Into collecting fines, housing prisoners? How much will it cost us for each dollar gained in premiums? Or will it all be nothing more than a token effort? Will law breakers get off with a slap on the wrist and gain no real incentive for the purchase of health insurance?

The real problem is that we’re trying to do too much. As far as I know, health insurance is the only insurance business that provides comprehensive coverage. All other insurance provides catastrophic coverage. What we’re demanding of health insurance providers is equivalent to a home insurer paying their customers for mowing the lawn. Comprehensive coverage doesn’t work. We can’t afford it for one thing, and more often than not it doesn’t cover what it says it will cover.

Insurance was first offered to cover losses in the case of calamity. Fire, flood, and shipwreck were what people got insurance for. You didn’t get paid when your ship sailed safely into port, you got paid when your ship disappeared and was reported lost.

So why are we demanding health insurance be handled differently? Why do we think comprehensive health care coverage is possible, when simple economics and psychology says it isn’t? It’s simple, you’re dealing with a bunch of lazy slobs.

There are people out there who think that comprehensive medical coverage means they’re getting free health care. Or nearly free once you’ve dealt with premiums and co-pay. Even with premiums and co-pay it is a rare person who has any idea how much his treatment is actually costing him. He has no idea how much extra he is being charged by his provider for the overhead added by the need to fill out paperwork for private or government insurer. As long as they’re not directly involved in the transference of money, it means nothing to them.

What we’re doing basically is paying a service fee so we don’t have to be bothered with handling money ourselves. We have convinced ourselves that we can, we are, or we should be getting free health care. So long as we don’t see the transaction taking place, we can lie to ourselves about what’s going on.

To be cruel, the only way we’re going to lower health care costs is by doing the following;

1. Outlaw comprehensive health insurance. Health insurance can only be offered for catastrophic conditions, including costly long term care. Accidents, cancers, or severe mental health conditions such as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder for example.

2. Insurance may not be offered for routine visits, vaccinations, or minor cuts and scrapes.

3. Medical bills must include the cost to the physician of any insurance paperwork. This notification to follow the form, “Your treatment for X cost this office Y amount of dollars in overheard in order to satisfy your insurance company’s reporting requirements.”

4. Everyone will be encouraged to set aside money for a medical emergency. One hundred percent of these funds will be exempt for state and Federal taxes, even if later spent on medical care.

5. All medical treatment and all medication is exempt from sales tax or the equivalent, wherever sales tax or the equivalent is applied.

6. All health care providers are encouraged to keep a “tip jar” in their office. Funds raised via the “tip jar” shall go towards covering the treatment of those patients unable to cover the cost of treatment themselves.

7. No patient shall be turned away because of inability to pay, so long as the treatment is medically necessary. (Yes, there are times when a rhinoplasty is medically necessary.)

To sum up, we’re asking too much of our medical system when we could be doing so much more ourselves. We don’t need others to take care of things we can damn well take care of, and it’s about time we started. Insurance is for floods, not for taking a bath.