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Insurance companies make healthcare expensive. Pass a law that requires all payers to pay the same rate for the same service, be it an insurance company or an
by transfire 13y ago
Insurance companies make healthcare expensive.
Pass a law that requires all payers to pay the same rate for the same service, be it an insurance company or an individual paying out of pocket and the system would get fixed in short order.
- jackschultz 13y agoI'm gonna go ahead and say it's not as simple as just "passing a law".
- zdw 13y agoThis. Middlemen always push the prices up and they exist to get a cut, nothing more. In many cases, the insurance agent who sells the policy gets paid the roughly the same amount as a primary care physician for looking after a patient. Only one party here is actually doing needed work...
- ahomescu1 13y agoOne scenario of how this plays out is that everyone winds up paying the maximum rate, not the minimum (best case, everyone winds up paying the average the old rates). Passing a law like this means the poorest insured will pay more, while the richest might pay less (or the same).
- ars 13y agoThe higher paying people subsidize the lower paying. If you did what you suggest then medicare would have to pay more (probably 50-100% more), which would necessarily increase taxes. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just keep in mind all the unintended consequences.
- Zigurd 13y agoA big step in the right direction, but, upstream of the insurance companies, the health care service and product providers have much greater supplier strength than in single-payer systems. There is still of lot of complexity inside that box but "Supplier strength in pricing" is much closer to the cost TL;DR than fat people.