Some of the uninsured just don’t want health insurance

Wouldn’t you like to feel the comfort that it’s already taken care of. What happens if you need expensive surgery and you don’t have 60,000 dollars in you wallet to pay for all of it at that time. Are you really going to have that much saved up. It’s ok to pay the small stuff out of pocket like checks ups but the insurance is there for the big things like removing and kidney and such.

“Health Insurance” can be something of a ripoff. You pay a dollar to your “insurance” company so it can keep 20 cents and give 80 cents to your doctor for the routine and fairly predictable expenses of living. This is the typical health plan which isn’t really insurance. It takes a cut for brokering predictable expenses. Insurance is purchased as a hedge against unexpected and unaffordable expenses. What most of us do is equivalent to buying car insurance that covers oil changes. Logically, it is going to be more expensive than leaving them out and purchasing directly.

The problem with the logic is that hospitals charge the uninsured such exorbitant prices compared to what they are willing to accept from insured patients. So, while I can afford even large unexpected costs, I buy insurance as protection against being overcharged by the hospital.

We in healthcare complain about being pushed around by insurance companies, but then force our patients to use them for routine expenses by not following the simple and fair policy of charging everyone the same thing, except for where we elect to extend charity.

It can be a rational decision to be uninsured and people should be free to make it. If you are uninsured for 20 years, and then have a major medical problem that costs you 100,000 dollars, at todays insurance rates you have still saved about 100,000 or more. Some people really can self-insure–as long as you are a saver.

If you are not a saver, then what you are doing is puting the local hospitals with their EMTALA obligations at risk without their consent. It is legal, but immoral.

It isn’t a rational understanding to not have at least catastrophic coverage. Abstract notions of how well you could invest your insurance money if you spent it on something interest-bearing ignores the reality that not everyone’s illness has the good grace to present only when they have enough saved to pay that theoretical $100,000 hospital bill. And for many that day is never. If this idea had any worth, then why isn’t there already a market for a convertible universal life insurance policy that lets you do just that: save in an interest-bearing and cash-value accruing account that will offer cartastrophic coverage but which if not used can be assigned as a death benefit just like any other kind of life insurance policy? I suspect no company would find it worthwhile.

“Get cancer and then come back and tell us how you are so happy to not have insurance and how you gladly pay your own way.”
Health insurance is nice in theory but in reality often falls far short. Pay insurance all your life, get cancer, and find out that the necessary treatment is considered “experimental” and not covered. Or find out that the treatment center near your home is considered “out of network” and you have to travel 3 hours several times a week for your cancer treatment.
I don’t want some insurance company telling me what treatment is covered or not covered, trying to weasel out of treating injuries- saying they are work-related or someone else’s fault.
I currently have health insurance through my work, but I would gladly be a saver and go without insurance if I could pay the “insured charge” and not the rip-off rates that medical providers are forced (by insurance contracts and MEdicare regulations)to charge the uninsured.

If your hit with a terminal illness and you have no insurance what are you going to do? Will you pay for all the days you are in the hospital. Some people just think they are invincible to sickness. Good luck when the blogger gets sick.

In my family the tradition for generations has been, when diagnosed with terminal illness, to refuse further medical care except for home care and die at home. Why should we help pay for the general culture’s refusal to come to terms with death?

We always paid all our medical bills, even when catastrophic events occured and, 50 years ago, we were frankly poor–it just took years sometimes but they all got paid without bill collectors being involved. We just don’t want to pay for the fools who don’t have the guts to go home and face death like a grownup when the time comes or for all the malingerers, drug addicts, self-abusers and weenies who think they are entitled to problem free lives.

“Maybe (just maybe) insurance costs would go down in the U.S. if the government started paying for some of these services.”

Please point to one government run entity where costs have been contained in the past.