4mo ago

The Product is . . . Comprehensenility

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211 comments

It's supposed to be that insurance converts inherent risk into a predictable cost, but health insurance is not really doing that. The costs remain unpredictable.
- The costs remain unpredictable.
  I wholly disagree. I predict that the costs will be unnecessarily high.
  
  But predictably. Give me a real fucking number, not just "high." You can't do, can you, fuck-face???
  Ugly cries angrily and shamefully in the corner knowing that the wrong person just got yelled at
  
  Stop knowing about my face.
  
  In the biblical sense?
  
  In the fucking sense.
  
  in the fucking sense, call that sexth sense
  
  I sex dead people
  
  Health insurance to necrophilia in 8 comments. Well done.
  
  Ahhh, but when
- But they know that, which is why healthcare costs have consistently increased higher than inflation.
  Healthcare is one of THE MOST demand inelastic commodities or services. People do not say “oooh that’s a lot of money - is there a worse doctor who is cheaper?”, instead they say “100% yes I will remortgage my home and sell assets to pay for the cancer treatment my child needs.” Nobody is at the free clinic by choice, they’re there because they cannot afford or borrow to pay for better care.
  Capitalism is incompatible with ‘rational consumer purchasing choices’ that apply to clothes, food, TVs, etc. because when there’s death or life altering negative outcomes, the only rational decision is to pay WHATEVER the price demanded is. Healthcare has a demand wall, not a demand curve.
  
  People do not say “oooh that’s a lot of money - is there a worse doctor who is cheaper?”, instead they say “100% yes I will remortgage my home and sell assets to pay for the cancer treatment my child needs.”
  I can't believe how many times I had to make this exact point to dipshits I worked with any time they uttered the term "free market".
  What am I going to do in an emergency in the back of an ambulance on the way to the ER? Hey, can you guys pull over for a sec? I need to check if the current ER doc is in network. Fuuuck ooooffff.
  I then recount the time I needed a non-emergency procedure (MRI for my back) which affords me plenty of time to shop around. I proceeded to call around to try to get prices (LOL) and then I got my insurance and MRI place on the phone all at once and I STILL couldn't get a solid number for how much it would cost me. Who the fuck else needs to be on the call to get a number???
  
  For mathematics wall is a curve. But yeah, completely agree.
- Indeed. They have a product. They are withholding it from us.
  
  That's only in the case of some vertical integrators like CVS. Most just get between you and other products.
  
  No, in theory, they work like a well-funded savings account: you put in a predictable amount of money every month, and they store it for you until you need to withdraw it; with an added benefit that they would allow you to withdraw more than you have (internally using other people's money to cover the difference) under the assumption that any shortfalls that result will all come out in the wash eventually; some people overpay, some people underpay, and you invest what you have in low-risk investments in the meantime. All insurance companies work like that in theory, or at least that's what they tell regulators. But in reality, they don't pay out nearly enough to provide the consistency people need.

211 comments