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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (129990)	2/2/2010 6:49:12 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541952

If we're going to have an subsidized insurance scheme that everyone can join, I think it would be best if its catastrophic insurance. I don't think that's workable. Folks in that position are already out of money. The simplest thing would be to use Medicare. We already use Medicare for the under-65 disabled, which is similar in that they involve high medical costs. It would be useful to know how large the cohort would be. The threshold for this program would have to be higher than the threshold insurance companies now use for denying coverage. Insurance companies would have to take those with more risk than they would like but less risk than what I called the "utterly uninsurable." That threshold would be set by law as the standard for eligibility.

To: TimF who wrote (129990)	2/4/2010 3:14:14 AM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541952

>>If your asking for what would normally be considered reasonably priced (I don't see why they wouldn't offer you extremely expensive insurance, but perhaps regulations prevent it, or perhaps they just don't think there is a market at that very high price) insurance your essentially asking for a handout of some sort. Your actual risk (or at least the most informed perceptions of your actual risk as you related them) is high, in a way similar to that of a pre-existing condition. Its not quite the same, you aren't asking to insure your house after the house burned down, but your asking for the cost involved in dealing with your risk to be spread to other people.<< Actually, Tim, I'm not asking for a fucking handout. I was asking you what kind of solution you thought society should offer for this kind of situation. "None," would be a perfectly reasonable response, if that's what you think. Since I don't seem to be able to cool down about it this evening, I'm going to simply decline to discuss this further. I do want to ask you to consider the question of why, if you think minimizing costs means only covering people for catastrophic illness, the Canadians and the Brits spend so much less of their GDP on healthcare than we do, while covering every citizen for annual checkups and every other damned thing. But once you've considered that question, go talk to somebody else about it.