It’s actually explicitly not mandatory.
If your only options for insurance are unlikely to cover the expected costs of your care because of their terms, then it’s only a loss. If your coverage might cover tens of thousands of dollars of surgery that you couldn’t cover otherwise, then it’s prudent to take the insurance fee loss than the surgery loss.
In a system where insurance doesn’t exist but the government also doesn’t fund it, each individual person would be financially crippled with debt if anything ever went wrong. We’ve also seen healthcare savings plans and mutual funds equally or even moreso capable of such fraud and unethical terms.
Ideally, we would elect representatives who want all healthcare funded through the government. The government is very clearly capable of operating at a deficit, and in fact would spend less under that system than they do currently on healthcare through subsidies and programs which compete with insurance companies despite not having authority over medical pricing.
I actually think a better analogy is treating it as a tax than a racket, currently. It’s still not accurate, but if you avoid paying it long enough then you get the mother of all fines. If you avoid paying a racket, you’ll also get the mother of all fines, because they’re gonna break your fucking legs.
In a system where insurance doesn’t exist but the government also doesn’t fund it, each individual person would be financially crippled with debt if anything ever went wrong.
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No. If the insurance didn’t create the atmosphere of territorial turfing, prices would be naturally set by competition. They would be much more accessible.
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Let us not forget the amount of claims that get denied in order to guarantee financial solvency for the middleman parasites.
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Ideally, we would elect representatives who want all healthcare funded through the government.
Yeah. Let’s just support this nonsense by printing more money. /s
If you avoid paying a racket, you’ll also get the mother of all fines, because they’re gonna break your fucking legs.
Direct violence is out of fashion. Now it is all about systematic financial crippling into homelessness and starvation.
No. If the insurance didn’t create the atmosphere of territorial turfing, prices would be naturally set by competition. They would be much more accessible.
Hospitals aren’t very competitive. Theres maybe 1 in a large town and that’s it. Small practices are already competitive. You do have a point about insurance companies intentionally driving costs up, but the hospital networks themselves have even more say and the only way to take that power away is having regulators set the prices and not the providers.
Let us not forget the amount of claims that get denied in order to guarantee financial solvency for the middleman parasites.
Average 18% denied, less than a percentage of denied claims appealed. So 82% of claims get covered.
Yeah. Let’s just support this nonsense by printing more money. /s
Actually, as I mentioned, the government would spend less than they currently do.
Direct violence is out of fashion. Now it is all about systematic financial crippling into homelessness and starvation.
Because nobody ever wins with direct violence. Everyone loses.
If the insurance didn’t create the atmosphere of territorial turfing, prices would be naturally set by competition. They would be much more accessible.
Healthcare suffers from several very competition distorting Economic effects.
- The so called “expert advantage”, which is the situation were the buyer doesn’t have the expertise to judge the quality of the service the seller is offering.
- That buyers are willing to pay just about anything to survive, so unlike pretty much everything else the upper limit to prices is incredibly high (basically, everything a person has plus how much debt they can take in).
- As somebody else pointed out, healthcare service provision is geographically constrained for a lot of things, the more urgent the situation the worse it gets, so for example if you have an accident and your life is in danger, if there is only one Hospital in town that’s were the ambulance will take you, so you literally have no choice.
- The cost and time to train medical professionals as well as of the equipment, means that for anything beyond simple clinics there is a high barrier to entry into that market.
Unlike the ideological pseudo-magical fantasy bullshit that some politicians spew about the Free Market in order to defend certain choices of theirs that benefit those who given them millionaire speech circuit fees and non-executive board memberships (namelly to justify privatising things that are in low competition or even natural monopoly markets), Free Market Theory only works for a few markets where there is a natural tendency for competition such as, say, teddy bears or soap, not for markets were there are multiple factors reducing choice and the ability of buyers to judge the quality of what they are buying before they buy it.
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Don’t think OP has his finger on the pulse of public sentiment regarding insurance.
This meme seems reductive. Mandatory protection would also cover a single-payer health system.
There’s a difference between protesting poor regulation of mandatory services (ie healthcare) vs a libertarian, “It’s my right to die in a car crash because I don’t want to wear a seatbelt”
Oh, you didn’t get it? The problem is not that it’s mandatory: it’s that it’s mandatory and you get denied anyway. Stop equivocating.
Are we seeing the same thing? Is the meme referencing denial in the room with us right now?
It’s right here. But you wouldn’t be able to notice it if you tried. ;)
This is the most naive thing I’ve read on the internet in quite a while.
Private insurance is quite possibly the worst thing to happen to humanity, and mandated private insurance to survive is telling poor people to die if they don’t slave hard enough.
My comment was directed at the comparison being made. I agree, private insurance isn’t a great way to move forward. Although, i don’t know that id say it’s the worst thing. It’s a single domino in a long line of shitty dominos.
Almost as naive as thinking this system is sustainable.
Not even close, considering no one here is suggesting it is. You know, saying someone’s take on a thing is dumb doesn’t mean that you are in support of it. It just means their take is dumb.
This is literally the dumbest thing I read in a while. My health insurance provider is not going to break my legs if I fail to pay them.
yeah you just die lol
No, but of your legs are broken they’ll try their best to do nothing even though you do pay.
At least the mob is honest about what you get for paying them.
They would if they could.
UHC AI had some cost-saving suggestions
It’s manufactured outrage- a lemmy specialty.
Yeah, they will do worse
No, they won’t.
Simp
Doesn’t a protection racket beat you up / destroy your house / damage you in some way if you fail to pay?
Insurance (either private or public) doesn’t do anything negative to you if you don’t pay, you just don’t get any positive benefits.
It turns out that calling something a different name is a good idea when it’s literally a different thing.
Insurance (either private or public) doesn’t do anything negative to you if you don’t pay
In Europe it is very mandatory, by law. Don’t fall for the universal healthcare scam ameribros.
edit: Healthcare is the hot topic, but let’s not forget the essential business insurance. Car insurance also very much doesn’t reimburse for the damages, so even the individuals are at loss even when not at fault. Due to personal experience I am led to believe that insurance companies do have their goons that do the bidding for uninsured business subjects.
Another problem is the monopoly style competition curbing. Those who tried opening a private health clinic know all about it. If it wasn’t for insurance territorial turfing, it would be much easier to run a clinic and compete by offering a fair price. Corruption is now a part of business it seems.
Just curious, do taxes count as mandatory protection money?
The concept of taxes was to empower the center for system maintenance, infrastructure, education, etc. We are gradually being handed the bill for all of those things, yet the taxes remain the same. The position of top management has become a tool for monopoly and oppressive control. Social economic system has become a self fueled prison. A couple of minutes past midnight.
The difference is how many lawmakers you’re willing or able to buy.
So you’re under the impression that the public likes our insurance system and takes issue with it being accurately called a ripoff? … That’s not the case. And we knew that even before a killer was widely praised for killing an insurance CEO
No insurance is mandatory.
This statement is incorrect
That’s just not true, at all.
Car insurance is mandatory if you have a car in the us and health insurance is mandatory in many states in the US.
Many landlords require renters insurance, and banks require homeowners insurance.
In my state workers comp insurance is mandatory if you have more than three employees.
Banks are required to have fdic insurance. I’m sure there are many more examples, but that is just off the top of my head.
Yeah but you could just not have a job, a house, health insurance, a bank account, or a car! /s
Kidding obviously, it’s illegal to be homeless as well
houses don’t need insurance once you own one.
True, you could spend ages 40-70 paying off a house that has all of your life’s work invested in it and then stop insuring it. Assuming you make enough money to not have to refinance it or take a reverse mortgage to pay for your medical bills that started piling up in your late 60s
Apparently someone doesn’t think that happens. But that’s what happens to the people I have known. Medical bills to reverse mortgage… Then sell what’s left of the equity to have assisted living for the last year or so when you’ve gotten to be more than anyone in the family can manage while trying to work and take care of their family/selves. When they die there is usually nothing left.
The American dream
Vehicle and property insurances are a public good safety measure. If you go and cause serious injury to someone with your vehicle or in your home they have every right to expect to be made whole again. Without that insurance you would personally be liable for those debts. Unless you’re willing to say that those kind of debts are not dischargeable in bankruptcy then insurance to cover them is essential for anyone who doesn’t have a few hundred thousand laying around.
Workers comp is useful much the same way, unless you want that dim employee who cuts their hand off to be the death of your business.
FDIC helps ensure that some fool tanking every asset the bank has won’t leave the depositors holding the bag.
Health insurance is for the vast majority of people required in some form under the rules of the ACA.
Insurance in the most basic sense is a pooling or risk. A universal single payer healthcare system is simply a pool that everyone is a part of by default. There’s a lot to be said for having a single entity to contact for payments, but you can be sure that even if we fully did away with the insurance system as it is today that there’s not going to be a ‘free MRI Wednesday’ in exchange for it. Someone will always be looking to keep a check on who spends howuch on what.
You aren’t forced to have any of those things.
Define “forced to”
Do you really not know what it means?
I’m more curious what it means to you
What? Business insurance, healthcare, third party property, indemnity.
Try driving a car without insurance and you’ll be arrested in many jurisdictions.
Then don’t drive a car. No one is forcing you to.
And health insurance isn’t mandatory. Sorry this flies in the face of manufactured outrage, but there’s no law that dictates you must have insurance.
It’s an option.
No US laws. There are other countries outside the US though. There are indeed laws in my jurisdiction that mandate insurance and If you can’t afford to live in the city, there are no jobs without a car.
I don’t doubt the US is that way, but the US has a very unique system when it comes to healthcare and insurance generally.
Also the first result in Google suggests there are indeed jurisdictions in the US that penalize a lack of insurance. You should have clicked your own link lol.
there are indeed jurisdictions in the US that penalize a lack of insurance
This isn’t how one would define “illegal to not have.” See, making it a penalty for not having, doesn’t default to being illegal for not having- which means it’s not mandatory. Which means-
You should have tried to understand what it was I was saying lol.
If you need To drive you need to have insurance It’s not an option to not drive in many places
No one is forcing you to drive anywhere.
Same “logic” as saying that “no one is forcing you to eat”.
In reality those who do have an option to not drive are in certain professional occupations (basically office jobs with remote working) and/or live in certain places (such as city centers were housing costs are much higher).
The forcing to drive isn’t done via a clear explicitly written law that sets penalities for people who don’t drive (clearly the only level of extremely painfuly obvious limitation that certain people need to identify it as an imposed choice), it’s done by removing choices from people or artifically making other choices be very negative, for example by giving so much room to cars and such weak penalties for running over cyclists that cycling becomes very dangerous, by outside city centers not having proper pedestrian walkways or by how Land Property laws inflated the price of housing - a life essential - to such level that many people can’t afford to live near work and have to commute to it, which they can’t do with public transportation because no such thing is provided or is laughably inadequate.
The “forcing” isn’t don’t in a “so painfully obvious that even a simpletion gets it” way, it’s done via removing of making unviable choices at multiple levels and isn’t equal for everybody - generally the less well of you are the worse it gets (for example people whose bank of mommy and daddy paid for their higher education so that generally they earn enough to have access to the kind of housing and/or be in a profession were, unlike the others, they do have a real choice not to drive).
(I actually don’t drive, and I’ve chosen not to drive because I can and I do think more people who do have a choice not to drive should do it like I do and walk or cycle to work, or even work from home, but I also hail from a poor working class background and don’t run around with well-off middle class delusions that my somewhat priviledged situation is typical rather than atypical)
Legal theft enforced by the government
What insurance is legally mandated? Even auto insurance requirements are only targeted to damages you cause others, not your damages, and most places you can establish a self-insurance program if you have enough money to throw into the reserve.
In Ontario Canada it is illegal to drive uninsured, 5k fine.
https://www.thinkinsure.ca/insurance-help-centre/driving-without-insurance-in-ontario.html
