4 ms·

I've never had trouble getting health insurance as an individual/family -- you just have to be willing/able to pay the premiums. It sometimes helps to incorpor

by payne92 18y ago

I've never had trouble getting health insurance as an individual/family -- you just have to be willing/able to pay the premiums. It sometimes helps to incorporate as a small business, but that's easy to do and doesn't cost much. If you can afford COBRA, you can usually afford to pay directly for a plan. (BTW, I'm not suggesting that healthcare is screwed up in a number of dimensions, I just think the premise of the article is flawed).

skmurphy 18y ago
If you picked the wrong parents it's not difficult to become effectively uninsurable unless you are part of a group plan.
tednaleid 18y ago
I'm guessing neither you, or any of your family members covered by your insurance have any significant pre-existing conditions. The premiums are much less "affordable" if this is an issue for you or your family.
- yummyfajitas 18y ago
  Insurance is there to protect you against high cost, low probability events; basically events where you can afford the expected cost, (probability of becoming sick) x (cost of treatment), but you can not afford (cost of treatment). If you have a pre-existing condition, (probability of becoming sick) == 1. In this case, insurance is pointless.
  - jerf 18y ago
    I sometimes think that half the problem with employer-provided health care is that people have stopped thinking of it as insurance, as you describe. Instead, you get people who think that they have some sort of right to pay $10 and get $100 of treatment in return, every year, for perpetuity. The vision plan at my recent open enrollment demonstrated this clearly. You pay $X, and everyone's sitting there determining if they get $X+ back from the plan. And in this case, the vision plan isn't even insurance, because basically the only people going on it have a 100% chance of paying out. And it turns out that if you work the math, for one person, or one person + spouse/SO, you pay in $X and the max payout is $X-, precisely because the probability of payout is so very close to 100%. (This is because the plan only covers glasses and routine eye exams; catastrophic eye damage is covered by normal health insurance.) (I further note that vision coverage has been one of the most free market of medical endeavors, precisely because of this math.) How do we know the system is distorted? Because almost nobody actually realizes that this is an insurance system, that you should be expected to pay routine costs out-of-pocket, and that the system is physically incapable of giving everybody in the pool more than they pay in. Unfortunately, this attitude is so ingrained that every government plan I've ever seen also reifies this mindset too, and I think any plan that is conceptualized that way will fail because from the very beginning, you've built it on a shoddy foundation. We have got to pry insurance away from the employers. (Once again, I note that we've managed to export this problem to the rest of the world. Similarly, I often think that the US would be really screwed by our crappy school system, except that we managed to export it to the entire rest of the world first, so nobody actually has a good system, just slightly different iterations of the same crappy model. "Fortunately" for the US!)
    - jbjohns 18y ago
      When you say "exported to the rest of the world" what countries do you mean? I live in western Europe and health insurance must be covered by the individual, and the school system is a lot better then what I experienced in the US.
      - jerf 18y ago
        Your school system is the same fundamentally broken system of corralling children into a pen and expecting them all to learn the same basic things at the same basic rate. Every industrial society seems to do it this way. I'd argue that some systems are slightly less broken and some slightly more, but compared to what could be, none of them are even close to their potential. And maybe you should specify your exact country. For instance, France (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92419273 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9241927... ): "France, like the United States, relies on both private insurance and government insurance. Also, just like in America, people generally get their insurance through their employer." Government health care as seen in the UK is hardly any different from employer health care in practice... it's slightly more disconnected from feedback, but employer health care is already pretty disconnected. So, exactly which country has fully individual health care with no government or employer involvement?
        jbjohns 18y ago
        I agree that the basic kind of school system everyone uses is broken (though the quality of pre-university education is low in the US), but the US exported that? I think it predates the US. I live in Switzerland. No government involvement is not realistic, but in Switzerland you are required to have your own health insurance (changing jobs has no effect on it). The government gets involved by putting a cap on how much insurance companies can make, which makes it less useful for them to use sleazy tricks to try and maximize profits. As far as the UK being basically the same thing, what system would you suggest? I personally like the Swiss system the best of everything I've seen, but it could be argued that it is just a variation of what the UK has. That is, we all must have insurance, therefor we all must pay for it and the major expenses that people I don't know end up costing me more money. The only real difference is that the insurance isn't government owned and there is some competition in it. But I can't imagine a system that could work better then these. The only other thing you could do is simply not cover some percentage of the people, but the US is a pretty solid example case that this doesn't work well. I believe that the reason employers are paying insurance is because the plans are already quite expensive and the employers can get a major group discount.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 18y ago
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anewaccountname 18y ago
You pay in after-tax dollars as an individual, right?
- russell 18y ago
  Medical and health insurance costs over 7% of income are deductible. Could be different this year, I haven't checked. If you have a business, it can be all deductible.
russell 18y ago
Wrong. If you have a preexisting condition, you can't get individual insurance. If you have more than two prescriptions, you can't get insurance. I can afford it, but I can't get it. Even if you have COBRA, the premium goes up by 50% in 18 months and runs out completely in 36.

by payne92 18y ago

skmurphy 18y ago

If you picked the wrong parents it's not difficult to become effectively uninsurable unless you are part of a group plan.

tednaleid 18y ago

I'm guessing neither you, or any of your family members covered by your insurance have any significant pre-existing conditions. The premiums are much less "affordable" if this is an issue for you or your family.

yummyfajitas 18y ago
Insurance is there to protect you against high cost, low probability events; basically events where you can afford the expected cost, (probability of becoming sick) x (cost of treatment), but you can not afford (cost of treatment). If you have a pre-existing condition, (probability of becoming sick) == 1. In this case, insurance is pointless.
- jerf 18y ago
  I sometimes think that half the problem with employer-provided health care is that people have stopped thinking of it as insurance, as you describe. Instead, you get people who think that they have some sort of right to pay $10 and get $100 of treatment in return, every year, for perpetuity. The vision plan at my recent open enrollment demonstrated this clearly. You pay $X, and everyone's sitting there determining if they get $X+ back from the plan. And in this case, the vision plan isn't even insurance, because basically the only people going on it have a 100% chance of paying out. And it turns out that if you work the math, for one person, or one person + spouse/SO, you pay in $X and the max payout is $X-, precisely because the probability of payout is so very close to 100%. (This is because the plan only covers glasses and routine eye exams; catastrophic eye damage is covered by normal health insurance.) (I further note that vision coverage has been one of the most free market of medical endeavors, precisely because of this math.) How do we know the system is distorted? Because almost nobody actually realizes that this is an insurance system, that you should be expected to pay routine costs out-of-pocket, and that the system is physically incapable of giving everybody in the pool more than they pay in. Unfortunately, this attitude is so ingrained that every government plan I've ever seen also reifies this mindset too, and I think any plan that is conceptualized that way will fail because from the very beginning, you've built it on a shoddy foundation. We have got to pry insurance away from the employers. (Once again, I note that we've managed to export this problem to the rest of the world. Similarly, I often think that the US would be really screwed by our crappy school system, except that we managed to export it to the entire rest of the world first, so nobody actually has a good system, just slightly different iterations of the same crappy model. "Fortunately" for the US!)
  - jbjohns 18y ago
    When you say "exported to the rest of the world" what countries do you mean? I live in western Europe and health insurance must be covered by the individual, and the school system is a lot better then what I experienced in the US.
    - jerf 18y ago
      Your school system is the same fundamentally broken system of corralling children into a pen and expecting them all to learn the same basic things at the same basic rate. Every industrial society seems to do it this way. I'd argue that some systems are slightly less broken and some slightly more, but compared to what could be, none of them are even close to their potential. And maybe you should specify your exact country. For instance, France (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92419273 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9241927... ): "France, like the United States, relies on both private insurance and government insurance. Also, just like in America, people generally get their insurance through their employer." Government health care as seen in the UK is hardly any different from employer health care in practice... it's slightly more disconnected from feedback, but employer health care is already pretty disconnected. So, exactly which country has fully individual health care with no government or employer involvement?
      - jbjohns 18y ago
        I agree that the basic kind of school system everyone uses is broken (though the quality of pre-university education is low in the US), but the US exported that? I think it predates the US. I live in Switzerland. No government involvement is not realistic, but in Switzerland you are required to have your own health insurance (changing jobs has no effect on it). The government gets involved by putting a cap on how much insurance companies can make, which makes it less useful for them to use sleazy tricks to try and maximize profits. As far as the UK being basically the same thing, what system would you suggest? I personally like the Swiss system the best of everything I've seen, but it could be argued that it is just a variation of what the UK has. That is, we all must have insurance, therefor we all must pay for it and the major expenses that people I don't know end up costing me more money. The only real difference is that the insurance isn't government owned and there is some competition in it. But I can't imagine a system that could work better then these. The only other thing you could do is simply not cover some percentage of the people, but the US is a pretty solid example case that this doesn't work well. I believe that the reason employers are paying insurance is because the plans are already quite expensive and the employers can get a major group discount.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

anewaccountname 18y ago

You pay in after-tax dollars as an individual, right?

russell 18y ago
Medical and health insurance costs over 7% of income are deductible. Could be different this year, I haven't checked. If you have a business, it can be all deductible.

russell 18y ago

Wrong. If you have a preexisting condition, you can't get individual insurance. If you have more than two prescriptions, you can't get insurance. I can afford it, but I can't get it. Even if you have COBRA, the premium goes up by 50% in 18 months and runs out completely in 36.