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Private insurance still exists in countries that have universal health care. In the UK, for example, a little over 10% of the population has private insurance.
by nugget 8y ago
Private insurance still exists in countries that have universal health care. In the UK, for example, a little over 10% of the population has private insurance.
In the US today, about 50% of the population has free or extremely low cost health care provided by the Government. The majority of poor people in the US now receive 100% free care via State-administered medicaid.
So what exactly does universal health care in the US look like? Medicaid/medicare for everyone? Based on the UK experience, we'd expect 20% of the US to still pay out of pocket for private insurance. Private insurance companies would also likely be free to discriminate on prior conditions because, after all, everyone has universal insurance as a backstop.
You risk creating a two-tier system of public-private insurance where healthy, wealthy people have access to concierge preventative care and very fast specialist referrals, while the chronically sick (uninsurable) and non-wealthy are stuck in a publicly run system with less preventative care and worse referral and wait times.
I'm not saying I have the answer - just raising some issues that are often lost in the debate over how to reform this market. Personally, since the medicaid expansion, I don't think insurance coverage is the problem any more. Now it's about quality and cost of care. And transparency and competition certainly seem like two reasonable ways to tackle cost.
- jbob2000 8y agoYou are just muddying up a debate that should not be this hard. There are 2 countries in the world that do not have public healthcare; The US and Liberia. Whatever counterpoints there are to the public option, 196+ countries have already had those conversations and already solved the problems. >You risk creating a two-tier system of public-private insurance where healthy, wealthy people have access to concierge preventative care and very fast specialist referrals, while the chronically sick (uninsurable) and non-wealthy are stuck in a publicly run system with less preventative care and worse referral and wait times. Sure, if that happens, fine let it happen. 0.1% of people might fall into the bracket of wealth that use private healthcare. Would you really hold up healthcare for 99.9% of people because of this? You do not have the answer, but everyone else does. Go public. The benefits far outweigh any detraction.
- freeone3000 8y agoBeats what we have now, where there's a two-tier system, where healthy, wealthy people have concierge preventative care and very fast specialist referrals, and the non-wealthy are stuck in a privately run system with exorbiant fees and impossibly high medical bills.
- jellicle 8y agoPrivate health insurance for covered procedures is generally forbidden in Canada, to avoid creating exactly this sort of two-tiered system. Works great.