Quite right that Ron Paul advocates a return to the gold standard. But more precisely, he advocates a return to a free market in money, which is not quite the same thing. I'm not a gold standard fan club member, but with gold being used as a form of money, it will keep the competing monetary methods in line. The present method of politicians spending like drunken sailors with Helicopter Ben quantitatively easing by the $trillion is a recipe for catastrophe.
Yes, Ron Paul does seem to have sound attitudes to spending money and taxation. Also, to insurance.
<I don't think the concept of insurance is compatible with providers picking and choosing those whom they will insure. > That's exactly what insurance companies are supposed to do. They assess risk and guess what will happen. They choose 100 similar people and estimate the likelihood that 1 of them or maybe 10 of them will have a particular bad event happen. If they judge the risk as being 1 in 100, then they charge twice the cost of the risk, pay the person who suffers the bad luck, and keep the profit. The other 98 were lucky but were happy to avoid the individual bad luck at a small cost.
Picking and choosing is exactly what insurers should do to minimize how much they have to charge to spread the risk. The whole idea of insurance is risk spreading, not communism "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". If somebody has bung dna, then it's known that they have a particular risk that others don't. People with that bung dna should get together and form an insurance pool for their particular risk. People without that bung dna have no need to insure against that risk. They have plenty of their own risks to insure against.
If risks can be calculated exactly, so that each person knows exactly what will happen to them, then they have no need of insurance because they know what's going to happen and can put the insurance money they would have paid to mitigation of the problem. If they buy insurance for an event of probability 1, then they have to pay for not just the risk, but the administrative costs of the insurer, the cost of fraudulent claims, the cost of tax on the insurer's profits, the cost of goods and services taxes on the insurance price. Since they know the event is going to happen, there is no reason to also pay those other costs.
GNOM will enable people to much more accurately understand their risks for a small cost. If their genes show a probabllity risk for a particular problem of 1 in 10, then they could form an insurance group with 10 of them, with 10 paying to the pool and the unlucky 1 being paid when it's found who is going to get the problem. There is no reason for somebody without any chance of the problem joining the pool siince they won't get the problem.
GNOM enables rational insurance. Or, more accurately, insurance that is less irrational. The cost of organizing insurance and supervising claims is inherently high. I prefer to avoid all those costs and simply carry risk myself, with no paperwork, no fraudulent claims, no hassles with insurance companies, no legal costs to force them to pay out if they default, no risk of them going bankrupt just when I want to make a claim, no goods and services tax to pay, no tax on their salaries and profits to pay.
If I crash my car into somebody and it is my fault, I would admit liability to them, apologize profusely and agree to pay the cost of the damage and perhaps some more for their trouble. I avoid crashing into people. It seems strange to find a third party, and arrange a bet with them = "I bet I crash my car into somebody". They say, "We bet you don't crash your car into somebody". I pay them to bet that I crash my car. That seems silly. I prefer to bet that I don't crash my car. I have been driving for going on 50 years and have saved a LOT of insurance payments and invested those savings. I can afford to have a BIG crash and still be ahead of the insurance payments I'd have made.
The same principles apply to health insurance. Health insurers can negotiate discounts with suppliers of medical services, but even with that saving, health insurance doesn't seem worthwhile to me. GNOM improves understanding of risk and helps decide what to do about it.
Bundling all risks for everything into one giant insurance pool would mean low risk people couldn't afford to join in. It's only when actually being at risk oneself that it's worth paying an insurance fee. Knowing one's own risks is crucial to making rational insurance decisions. To assess somebody's risk, insurers need to know that information too. If they don't have a risk, the insured can enjoy a lower insurance cost. If they have the risk, they'll have to pay for that risk and decide whether it's worth the cost.
Mqurice |
