A question on insurance

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Not necessarily. Risk pooling is the major advantage, but we have to remember the whole issue of marginal benefits. Frankly, our pools can probably be smaller than the entire population and still get most of the benefits of risk pooling, just like our statistical samples can be smaller than a census in order to have good estimations. Even further, as other posters have pointed out, monopolies do tend to have incentive issues.

Even this is not necessarily the case. Private monopolies can be challenged by new entrants. Private monopolies also still have incentives to push away from bureaucracy. Public offices don't do well at avoiding the red tape, and for the most part, the incentives to make sure government services are efficient probably is very low. People may be concerned, but I'd bet that most voting occurs on less valuable issues such as gay marriage and things like that.

My question then is: what are the incentives other than more effective means to deny healthcare to people?

Cheaper health costs Insurance is a consumer of health services like: hospitals, drug makers.

How is that different from an unelected pencil pusher at a call centre in Bangalore deciding whether or not your treatment is covered?

In my own practice, I treat Canadians covered under publicly funded insurance systems from every province. I also treat privately insured visitors, some of whom have travel insurance policies and others of whom are covered under "out of country" provisions on their ongoing private insurance.

I do not need to get approval for treatments, other than experimental treatments, for patients covered by my home province's system, or indeed any other provincial system. But I do have to deal with pre-approval from private insurers. The visitors whose insurers most often refuse to approve treatment are visitors with private insurance from the United States.



How about how people in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Japan are treated? Lets even extend that to the entire OECD. Then at least we are looking at countries with economies large enough to provide for health care.



And private insurers who provide short-term and long-term disability benefits do precisely the same type of thing. You're taking an anecdote, but failing to recognize that it is equally applicable to the system that you prefer.



I have news for you. Health care is politicized. So long as people have an expectation of access to health care, they are going to expect government to ensure that there is a system there to care for them. It doesn't matter whether that system is publicly delivered, paid for from public insurance, or simply publicly regulated--it is going to be politicized.

The only way to depoliticize health care is to completely deregulate it. That worked really well with savings and loan in the 80's and 90's. It worked really well with subprime. So it's bound to work well with healthcare, isn't it?



Fair enough. But all I will say is, "Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it."

Actually it would have been worse with a public option. The example is seen from Oregon State.

i'm in favor of the canadian example.

Risk pooling just means a rationing in some way. If people really want to eliminate rationing and death panels then the most logical alternative is to create the biggest pool possible to reduce the overall costs on the individuals who invest. A compulsory investment wouldn't be hard to pull off given that such a thing is already done with social security.

My question then is: what are the incentives other than more effective means to deny healthcare to people? I've yet to really see incentives that aren't simply based on larger pools and better loyalty which both could be done through simply making the whole ordeal public and compulsory drawing from both corporate and private incomes. The only incentives I see are that the larger insurance companies can offer more health providers (and yet still not 100%) and insurance companies get larger through larger pools and more stable investment in their insurance "product".

Private monopolies are very effective at eliminating new entrants via lobbying and control of the legislation both on a nation and statewide level. Shy of overhauling that aspect, there is only quaint theory about how things "are supposed" to work. There's still more risk for unhappy customers and an ability to change things with elected officials and there's more ability to provide care for a greater scope of the populous.

However Government has no incentive on dealing with waste and are more liable to cut services of people and give themselves fat paychecks.

Insurance Companies have to operate on a budget and to get a profit the kind of waste you see in insurance companies would grow exponentially under government.

Then why isn't healthcare exponentially more expensive than ours in countries with a single-payer system? Why is healthcare actually much cheaper in these other countries?

Oh so you mean something like this:

He never imagined the ordeal that would follow: The young man was turned away from five hospitals, got lost in an ambulance and, 28 hours after he was diagnosed, he had a burst appendix removed -- in Montreal.

Because Wakefield's Gatineau Memorial Hospital does not have surgical capacity, the doctor who diagnosed him with appendicitis last Friday started looking around for one that did. Usually, patients from Wakefield are sent to Hull or Gatineau, but on that night, there were no available beds at either.
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/new ... =15068&p=1

Didn't take me long to find either.