Originally Posted by
Rober
and, it seems that letting insurance companies (not the government) regulate and ration health care is like sending the monkey for the bananas. They've cherry-picked their "customer base" to yield the most healthy, least heath-risky pool of "insureables," leaving the rest - those who are really sick, very poor, and too old to land a job that will pay a "market" premium for coverage - to fend for themselves in what is essentially a poverty-delineated national health care system: TANF / Medicaid in which millions of sick people are forced to maintain sub-poverty in order to simply stay alive. I seriously doubt any federal plan for "socialized medicine" would be this heartless, and this greedy, no matter which branch of government creates and administers it.
Insurance is really inefficient.
Ultimately, on average, everybody has to pay their own medical bills. That's where insurance companies get the money to pay claims - from us.
In addition to what they pay for actual medical expenses, insurance companies also have a lot of built-in administrative expense. The two biggest departments in any insurance company are underwriting and claims. The job of underwriting is evaluate prospective insureds and not to insure the ones who are likely to generate claims. The job of claims is to pay only claims that meet the letter of the policy.
A single payer medical care program that covers everybody would eliminate both departments.