4 ms·

Maybe we should have two separate kinds of health insurance? One for true emergencies (like car accidents), and rare life threatening diseases (like cancer bef

Maybe we should have two separate kinds of health insurance? One for true emergencies (like car accidents), and rare life threatening diseases (like cancer before 60). Another for routine things, but as others have said, routine things shouldn't be so expensive. I like the idea of structuring it like a term life insurance policy. If you die, you get money, and in some policies you even get some percentage before you die to have fun. So, if you get cancer or whatever, perhaps you'd have a pool of funds available to you to deal with the disease, and you can use that money how you want, and perhaps even keep the remainder (or a portion of it) to incentivize keeping cost down. Also, it would make sense for the pool of funds available to someone to be based on remaining years. If you get cancer when you 20 it makes sense to spend a million dollars trying to cure that. If you're 90, maybe it makes sense to treat it but not as aggressively or in as costly of ways. From the perspective of building a society that you would be willing to be in, assuming you were randomly born into that society without knowing to what parents, I still think many people would agree they'd rather spend heavily on younger people than older.

danans 8y ago
> Another for routine things, but as others have said, routine things shouldn't be so expensive. This is basically a subscription. But this is also how health insurance already works in part today. A certain portion of your premium is paying for routine doctor's office visits - the insurance company is basically just acting as a payment processor for this portion of your healthcare expenditure. You could separate it from health insurance, but it likely won't make a huge difference in costs or access to care.
pdonis 8y ago
> Maybe we should have two separate kinds of health insurance? I agree we should have two different types of "plans". The one for emergencies and rare conditions would be insurance. The other would not. :-) One key objective of the "other" plan (the one that's not insurance) should be to make the actual costs of services visible to the patients, who are the ones in the best position to assess the value of those services to them. One of the biggest inefficiencies in our current system is that people get all kinds of health care services without any idea of what they actually cost. That means nobody really knows whether those services are worth what they actually cost. That's a recipe for huge inefficiency and high costs, and so it's no surprise that that's what we have.
BurningFrog 8y ago
> Another for routine things, but as others have said, routine things shouldn't be so expensive. But this is not an insurance. Structuring it as an insurance - as we have done - only makes it a lot more expensive than paying for it out of pocket.
- pdonis 8y ago
  Exactly.

danans 8y ago

> Another for routine things, but as others have said, routine things shouldn't be so expensive. This is basically a subscription. But this is also how health insurance already works in part today. A certain portion of your premium is paying for routine doctor's office visits - the insurance company is basically just acting as a payment processor for this portion of your healthcare expenditure. You could separate it from health insurance, but it likely won't make a huge difference in costs or access to care.

pdonis 8y ago

> Maybe we should have two separate kinds of health insurance? I agree we should have two different types of "plans". The one for emergencies and rare conditions would be insurance. The other would not. :-) One key objective of the "other" plan (the one that's not insurance) should be to make the actual costs of services visible to the patients, who are the ones in the best position to assess the value of those services to them. One of the biggest inefficiencies in our current system is that people get all kinds of health care services without any idea of what they actually cost. That means nobody really knows whether those services are worth what they actually cost. That's a recipe for huge inefficiency and high costs, and so it's no surprise that that's what we have.

BurningFrog 8y ago

> Another for routine things, but as others have said, routine things shouldn't be so expensive. But this is not an insurance. Structuring it as an insurance - as we have done - only makes it a lot more expensive than paying for it out of pocket.

pdonis 8y ago
Exactly.