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> Pay what you can Surely "what you can" should be relative to both your income and your need. We'd need to supervise the system to make sure people aren't tak

> Pay what you can Surely "what you can" should be relative to both your income and your need. We'd need to supervise the system to make sure people aren't taking advantage or else the whole system goes broke. > into a common pool We could also invest the money in the pool to make some extra cash and reduce what people need to pay in, we'd have to have an organization do that too. > (only as much as you need) How can we know what people need? We'd have to charge a token amount for office visits and medication so that people aren't frivolous with their medical visits, while perhaps guaranteeing an out of pocket limit in case of extreme illness. We'd also need some kind of system to verify that people are only taking what they need. I think you just invented health insurance.

mikeash 7y ago
They’re describing health insurance, except for the part where you pay what you can and get what you need and people are all in one pool.
- Domenic_S 7y ago
  We probably have different ideas of "paying what you can". How do you judge whether someone is only paying what they can, or they are taking advantage? Not a rhetorical question. One way is like we do today -- highly-paid positions often come with high-quality insurance, which is (ime) fairly expensive and low-paid positions have less expensive insurance that is a bit worse (all this on average, I'm sure there are outliers). We are in different pools today but I don't see how that's meaningfully different than everyone being in one pool if the individual pools are large enough and you can't discriminate the population of the pools.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    There are cases where it’s hard to tell if someone is truly paying what they can, but there are also cases where it’s easy: when it costs more than they can pay. Health insurance trivially fails the “paying what you can” criterion for sufficiently poor people.

mikeash 7y ago

They’re describing health insurance, except for the part where you pay what you can and get what you need and people are all in one pool.

Domenic_S 7y ago
We probably have different ideas of "paying what you can". How do you judge whether someone is only paying what they can, or they are taking advantage? Not a rhetorical question. One way is like we do today -- highly-paid positions often come with high-quality insurance, which is (ime) fairly expensive and low-paid positions have less expensive insurance that is a bit worse (all this on average, I'm sure there are outliers). We are in different pools today but I don't see how that's meaningfully different than everyone being in one pool if the individual pools are large enough and you can't discriminate the population of the pools.
- mikeash 7y ago
  There are cases where it’s hard to tell if someone is truly paying what they can, but there are also cases where it’s easy: when it costs more than they can pay. Health insurance trivially fails the “paying what you can” criterion for sufficiently poor people.