Over the last 10 years we have paid for health insurance. The premiums have gone up every year. We raised our deductable. Still the premiums increased, often doubling. None of our other costs doubled on an annual basis, why medical?
Did your medical costs double on an "annual" basis for 10 years? Really? Or did they "often" double (your statement from the sentence before that), other years going up by far less? Let's say your insurance costs 10 years back for you and Lady Orca were $100 per month. Then they doubled on an annual basis. They would now be $51,200 a month, or a little over $600,000 per year. Has that really happened to you? And with no medical problems and no claims history?
But the sad part is that all these funds went towards nothing, as everyone is healthy. So out of the thousands and thousands we paid for insurance, we took almost no services.
I suspect, especially if you have children, you may have taken some services. But even if you didn't, your statement betrays a fundamental miscomprehension of the basic purpose of insurance. Insurance is a pooling of risks, a payment of an amount of money up front by many people to cover the large costs of a few people. If there are 10,000 houses in your town and everybody pays $500 a year for insurance against their house burning down, but only five houses burn down, did the other 9,995 people waste their $500? I don't think so -- they were protecting themselves against ("insuring" against) a risk that their house would be the one to go up in flames. Just like you were protecting yourself when you bought medical insurance but didn't get sick. You didn't get sick, but you very well might have gotten sick, perhaps very sick.
Now when the wife looks me in the eye and says Mr. Orcastraiter, "I'm not sending these thieves another cent...build me the addition we've wanted for the last 10 years." Mr. Orca hops to it.
Mr. Orca perhaps ought to think before he hops, next time. Certainly, if you choose to have a bigger house at the risk of not being able to care for yourselves should someone get seriously ill, you are free to make that choice. The objection some would raise to that approach is that, once you have decided that having a bigger house is more important to you than being able to go to a doctor or hospital if your health goes bad, why should my family (through taxes) pay for your family's health care? Why shouldn't we build ourselves a bigger house instead, and let Mr. Lucky and Gloop and the despicable Lazarus Long pay for our health care too? After they are done paying for yours, of course -- first come, first served.
Or if the government pays for everybody's care, then everybody can use the money "saved" to build a bigger house, maybe even a house as big as the newly renovated Chez Orca. Maybe even a whale-sized house. Then we will all end up living in bigger houses and we'll be healthy besides! Utopia....... (Ummm..... <scratching head> seems like somehow that doesn't quite add up. Ummmm, if government pays for the health care, where does government get the money.... oh yes, it takes it from us, which means we can't build that new addition onto Chez Dog after all. Damn!)
There is no calculation to scheme from anyone. In fact if we would have self insured ourselves over the past decade, we would have been able to cover our own medical needs and we would have had the addition built already.
And if you chose to go without home insurance and your house burned down, what then? Should the government tax the citizenry to give you shelter, since you would now be "homeless"? I think you are refusing to recognize the basic purpose of insurance (see above).
All we want as a family is reasonable care at a reasonable price. Today's insurance rates are not reasonable.
Where does most of that money go? The short answer is that a good-sized chunk goes to hospitals and other medical establishments such as test centers and clinics, lesser but still good sized chunks go to doctors and pharmaceutical companies, and some to administrative costs and, yes, profit. Some (not a huge percentage) goes to John Edwards' former colleagues and their clients.
Even if you removed insurance company profits from the equation (and those profits have hardly been robust -- in fact, many health insurers and HMO stocks have suffered mightily due to profit erosion over those same ten years), you still have to pay for what you are getting.
Or, you can choose as an alternative not having the health care. As the late Mike Royko of the Chicago Tribune once wrote, a decade or so ago:
"FOR THOSE who truly believe that doctors are overpaid, there is another solution: Don’t use them.
That’s right. You don’t feel well? Then try one of those spine poppers, needle twirlers, or have Rev. Bubba lay his hands upon your head and declare you fit.
Or there is the do-it-yourself approach. You have chest pains? Then sit in front of a mirror, make a slit here, a slit there, and pop in a couple of valves.
You’re going to have a kid? Why throw your money at that overpaid sawbones, so he can buy a better car and a bigger house than you will ever have (while paying more in taxes and malpractice insurance than you will ever earn)?
Just have the kid the old-fashioned way. Squat and do it. And if it survives, you can go to the library and find a book on how to give it its shots."
bizbag.com
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And then there is this. Human beings in some form or another have been around for maybe 5,000 years. At first, more prey than predator and lacking in basics like sanitation and health insurance, they didn't live very long. Reliable statistics from those early days are hard to come by, but let's say they lived around 25 years on average in the early days. Seems like a reasonable guess.
By 1900, in America, the average life span was 47 years. Let's round that up to 50 years. In other words, in 4,900 or so years human beings may indeed have managed the terrific feat of increasing their life spans by 25 years. All without affordable health insurance, or any health insurance at all.
Today, just over 100 years later, the average life span in America is around 75 or a bit higher. That's 25 more years of life span in just the past 100 years (recall that the first 25 year advance took nearly 5,000 years). A good argument can be made that the widespread availability of health insurance whereby individuals shoulder a burden for their own health care has contributed significantly to making the resources available to extend our life spans so rapidly.
Those resources made it possible. Cures did not invent themselves; drugs were not (for the most part) discovered lying behind a rock in the Australian Outback. Doctors were not trained in the local pub.
Life spans are longer because some very smart and dedicated people worked long and hard, at great personal sacrifice and, yes, for profit and financial reward, to make our lives longer, healthier and more productive. It costs more. It ought to cost more. If it hadn't happened, I'd be shopping for a coffin pretty soon.
Should our response be gratitude, or should we whine incessantly (sitting in our newly expanded abodes with all of our electronic gadgetry) about how it costs too damn much? |
