THE ILLOGIC OF HEALTH INSURANCE

As the election season continues to roll along its merry way (if you can call it merry...), I've noticed that both democratic candidates are proposing pseudo-socialized health care reforms. The basics of these plans tend to settle on the idea that if everyone had health insurance, they would be able to pay their health costs, and we would be able to help the poor and less fortunate. Their plans are "95% similar", and they argue about silly nonsense like whether we should include a mandate that everyone have health insurance. But what of the idea the health insurance for everyone will make people better off? Anyone who has health insurance can tell you, insurance companies SUCK. So why are they advocating health insurance? Because given the current situation in our health care system, giving everyone health insurance is an easier way to make sure everyone at least has some kind of access to treatment without completely revamping the entire system. However, the premise of health insurance, at least to me, doesn't make much sense to begin with.

Think about this: the basics concept of how business works is that it is in both parties' (the producer/company and the consumer) interest to complete the transaction. The company wants your money. You want the company's product. Pretty simple, huh? It's the foundation of capitalism. However, in health insurance, the incentives for the insurance company have been perverted. In this case, you give your money to a company who's BEST INTEREST is to NOT give you the coverage that you're paying for and need. They do this by classifying treatments as experimental, or looking for omissions on your insurance application, anything to deny you coverage. Basically, they do whatever it takes to make sure that you don't get what you need to survive. The incentives in the health care system is no longer to provide quality health care, but to make as much money for as few people as possible. Wonderful.

I raised this concern to my professor the other day, and she told me this: "Health insurance isn't entirely illogical. The concept of health insurance is this: everyone pays monthly to a company, and the company takes on the distributed risk that if anyone of the customers get sick, they have a pool of money, so to speak, to draw on to pay for it, and the customers pay this company to manage this pool of money."

I seized on the term distributed risk. Setting aside the inherent inefficiencies of government (especially ours), doesn't this sound EXACTLY like something the government should be doing for all its citizens? We all put our money into a pool (through taxes), and the government takes money from this pool to give to its citizens to pay for their health care. The risk that one citizen will get sick is distributed to everyone, so that one person doesn't have to carry the burden. At least with this system, because the system is run by a government that is supposed to work in the interest of its citizens, it will for their interest. In a system where the citizens actually paid attention to what their government is actually doing, the citizens would make sure the government manages the system fairly and efficiently.

There is also evidence to show that countries with socialized health care spend more time and money on preventative medicine (you know, to make sure you don't get sick to begin with; saves the country a lot of money). Does anyone remember learning about nutrition in health class in high school? I don't. We learned about the food pyramid, I think (and does anyone know how fucked that thing is? I'm still flabbergasted they managed to sell that to the American public. It's a nutrition system designed by people who have an interest in selling you more wheat! That's why the Atkins diet works well. Grain isn't healthy for you!), but really, we're never taught how to take care of ourselves. I think if we were to stop and think about what a health care system would look like without having to deal with legacy systems and political power, it most certainly wouldn't look like this. I also don't think continuing with the basic foundations of the health care system and merely laying "universal health insurance" over top of it is going to solve the problem. Health care is not one of those things people take advantage of (i.e. fleece for their own benefit without actually needing it), and I do believe a system could be designed without some of the conceptual flaws of a socialized system. It's just a matter of getting the powers-that-be to realize they're trading the welfare of this country for their own personal wealth. I hope if we lay a theoretical foundation for socialized health care, we can realize that it's merely a matter of designing a system that actually works to make people healthier, because clearly our current system does not.