Premiums go up all the time. Within the span of an individual policy they might not increase, but insurers are constantly issuing new policies, and they will set premiums to take into account that prices will increase over the life of the policy. It’s definitely the case that insurers make more by insuring a $1M home than they do by insuring a $200k home. Why would it not be true that they make more by insuring expensive health care than they do by insuring inexpensive healthcare?
People pay premiums, some of those premiums end up in the pockets of the people who did the work, some of them end up in the pockets of the insurers, that is what I meant by their ‘cut’. The more expensive the thing insured, the larger (in absolute dollars, not as a percentage) the share the insurer gets is.
Oh me too. I had to have two surgeries about 6 weeks apart. For the second one, I got hit with a bill for an assisting surgeon who was not in network. I never met the guy. I was already under anesthesia when he came into the OR.
Never saw him, never was given the option to wait for a covered assisting surgeon, for all I know the guy just happened to see my paperwork and added his name to it. They were “generous” enough to write off most of that bill. Still, after insurance, we had to take out a loan against our 401K to pay our bills.
Because home owners insurance is not health insurance. With homeowners insurance you don’t have building contractors with secret prices who also provide insurers with automatic write offs and accept only a percentage of their fees as you do with healthcare.
Also, the insurer only makes more off the $200K home if there are no fires, floods, or other costly events in the insured life of the home. Over time, the $50K home can be more profitable since the total liability is only 50K but the premiums for the insured are a higher percentage of the total value of the home.
Perhaps, but I suspect that profit is offset by the extremely high charges involved in healthcare and by the frequency which claims are made against the policy… Unlike homeowners insurance, health insurance gets claims against it at least once a year and more if there is a health problem. While everyone eventually will have failing health, home insurers can rely on the fact that most policy holders will never make a claim against the policy.
I’m not so sure. Around where I live if you get in an car accident and get a pay-out from the insurance company, your premiums go up so much that you generally have lost money within a couple of years. They know everyone has to have insurance by law, so they basically don’t actually give anyone any money ever. Obviously with health insurance they pay out sometimes, but the kinds of things people are talking about here (“oh, that doctor who came in for a consult while you were unconscious, yeah, you have to pay for that”) are part of the ways that the companies contain costs - they simply don’t pay for things if it doesn’t suit them.
Well, it’s hard for me to get my head around how they would make more money if things were cheaper. Imagine healthcare cost very little, enough that it was worth insuring against serious health problems but not enough that a person with a decent job would go bankrupt if they had to pay out of pocket. Would insurance companies somehow be making more money in that scenario?
At any rate, the current situation of escalating costs is hardly driving them out of business. Large health insurers continue to make billions of dollars of profit a year.
I say that’s bull. She doesn’t owe it. She’s just going to be forced to pay for it. I don’t think we should enable doublespeak, and saying that someone in her situation “owes” what she can be forced to pay, or someone with power/influence “earns” what they can force others to pay, and all the rest, is doublespeak.
You seem to be using moral indignation to equivocate on the term “owe”. Legally, she owes, based on her contacts with her insurance company and US law. Whereas you are making a moral, Utopian argument.
I agree it is unfair and that the current system should be changed (to single payer/universal healthcare IMO) but under out current system she legally press the balance.
I’m only using one definition, equivocation implies switching between two or more definitions. I’m trying to push back on the way legal definitions so often push out common definitions and make it harder to criticize law and other power structures.
No. This was happening long before Obamacare. I worked at a psych hospital before Obamacare and we had the same issues. We were a newer hospital that didn’t contracts with all the major insurance companies in our market. Plus, some of the insurance companies weren’t offering parity of coverage with mental health. We still wanted the business so we would offer reduced rates to those that had insurance, but just weren’t covered. Kind of f****d up if you think that we were charging non-insured patients a higher rate.
The hospital that wasn’t contracted with her insurance should have offered to transfer her as SOON as she was stabilized. The hospital has the power to write off that balance or reduce it dramatically based on her income. FICO recently changed how they weight medical debt in credit scores so that it will help consumers. Staring at $50k in medical bills is no joke though. Shame on our society for allowing people with insurance to still get bankrupt.
