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Yes this is horrible but... wont this inevitably self correct? The further they go down this road, the more their acceptance criteria will converge on insuring
by tomxor 7y ago
Yes this is horrible but... wont this inevitably self correct?
The further they go down this road, the more their acceptance criteria will converge on insuring people that never need a payout. Once people clock onto that fact, the insurance becomes worthless - At which point other insurance companies will be able to come in and compete on a non-discriminatory basis and operate on the principle of a tax that spreads cost rather than a gamble that attempts to never actually deliver value to the customer.
... or you could just skip straight to an actual tax based health system and cut out the profiteering middle man. Yes I like the NHS.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoChina already has universal healthcare, it’s just not very good yet.
- tomxor 7y agoI know... i used it. It's nothing like the NHS.
- rqs 7y agoUniversal healthcare? What does that mean? In China, we only have one type of healthcare, the one that needs to be paid. There is no healthcare for free here. (Unless of course, you're a high ranking CCP party member, that way you can enjoy all the goodies from all over the country for free, including free blood plasma from young people* to keep you feel good when you're old. *Caution: HIV maybe included due to technical difficulties).
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoTechnically we (and our employers) pay for it via payroll deductions from our paycheck (the one labeled social health insurance? They then gave us a healthcare benefit account (in my case linked to bank of Beijing). It was all very useless, but technically China is listed as a country with universal healthcare. Never donate blood in China, unless you are forced to by your school/work unit/whatever.
- deogeo 7y agoIt won't, because the insurance doesn't become worthless. It only means that, if you were able to get it, you're less likely to need a payout.
- tomxor 7y agoI'm offering an extreme dichotomy to highlight the effect... reality will not be so extreme but the value difference will be great enough to cause competition (self correction). Another aspect of a company focused on reducing payout by selection is that they will probably be less prepared to support customers who actually need help, it all feeds into an opportunity for competition as the product of the gambling insurer has less and less value. It boils down to two quite opposed principles: 1. I want to try to prevent payout and focus on taking home as much of the sales as possible. 2. I want to try to spread the cost of health care and provide an honest and valuable service. It's hard do both well. I'd rather be in boat #2 in case I actually need help i'd trust them to be to be more capable of providing it since they are expecting it rather than trying to avoid it. If enough people realise this, they will all head for option 2, and option 1s will have to change their principles or pivot into some sort of health vetting service.
- deogeo 7y agoLooks to me like an insurer that manages to discriminate who they insure, but pays out as well or better than non-discriminating insurers (say, because they have more money, because they need to pay less often), will come out on top. I don't think the principles of trying to maximize profit, and paying out insurance, are so acutely opposed they could not coexist in the same company. It's just the conflict between cutting costs and maintaining quality - something almost all companies face.
- banku_brougham 7y agoNot every dynamic system is self correcting, in fact if the hypothesis is that a system is ‘stable’ in that sense the next step in the discussion should bear on: - the forces in action and their relative directions - the regime within which we could consider dynamic changes to be stable - the time range we should expect the system to converge to the hypothesized equilibrium state Most importantly in my opinion, is not assuming that a stable regime exists within a time/space envelope that corresponds with a physically achievable state in the real system we are trying to approximate. I would put that sort if assumption into the category of ‘common falacies.’
- tomxor 7y agoI should not have used the term "self correcting" as it is suggestive of fitting neatly into a dynamic system model - I was envisioning more of a social change, where the collective views of society reach a tipping point (though may be gradual) as the driving principles of such organizations work to devalue it's own product, it's hard to model the views of society, but there have been many such changes throughout history.