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That is first-order thinking. After all, if healthcare was cheap no-one would be incentivised to pay a lot of premium for health insurance. It's in the health
by seanhunter 5y ago
That is first-order thinking. After all, if healthcare was cheap no-one would be incentivised to pay a lot of premium for health insurance. It's in the health insurance companies interest for people to be frightened of high costs of healthcare that they pay and then to only pay out less than they receive in premium.
- cortesoft 5y agoThis doesn’t follow. Having cures for chronic, expensive to care for diseases won’t reduce the demand for health insurance, because people can still get injured or get one of the other countless ways to need healthcare.
- pdfernhout 5y agoTo build on your second-order point, under Obamacare, health insurers get to keep a certain percentage of premiums based on what treatments costs but would have to refund the rest. So, it is in the financial interest of insurance companies for medical interventions to be expensive and recurring. I found this surprising, because, like the poster you are replying to, it does make sense at a first-order level that insurance companies would make more profits if they paid out less for a specific individual's health issue. But the second order effect of skimming a percentage of total costs probably dominates here. And of course, for-profit medical care systems and individual doctors also generally have no financial incentive to contain costs.