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There's a very good reason for medical insurance beyond catastrophic events. Preventative medicine is much, much cheaper. Insurance makes routine checkups che
by yoden 16y ago
There's a very good reason for medical insurance beyond catastrophic events. Preventative medicine is much, much cheaper. Insurance makes routine checkups cheap/free, which means they're more likely to be taken advantage of.
Medicare has a much larger say in what sorts of procedures will be used (the ever widening--yet still not wide enough--umbrella of PET imaging is a great example).
- glenra 16y ago"Preventative medicine is much, much cheaper" I question that assertion. Source? Note that it is not sufficient to merely say "if you have condition X, it's better to have caught it early", because that ignores (a) the cost of testing all the people who don't have condition X for that condition and (b) the cost when widespread testing leads to false positives which cause one to think the patient has condition X leading to treatment which produces needless expense, disability and/or death. Every time you take your car in for an inspection the mechanic is likely to find things that are wrong and need fixing; ditto for taking your body in for a check-up. But on the margin, medicine is just about as likely to make you less healthy as more healthy, so being prescribed more of it is not a clear win. (see the Rand study, MRFIT, and so on)
- skmurphy 16y agoPreventative medicine may do a lot to prolong life and improve the quality of life if properly applied. It's interaction with insurance companies objectives or Medicare reimbursement policies may not always yield the results that you assert.You should make a distinction between insurance to cover catastrophic events and it's use to enforce a variety of social and political objectives. The former involves a certain amount of moral hazard, the latter considerably more.