What's wrong with health insurance
One of the implications of the
argument
I was making about insurance is that insurance
isn't a particularly good model for providing health
care. The reason is that although people have different
health problems, most people spend a fair bit on health
care every year. This amount, is effectively
a fixed risk and therefore not particularly useful to
insure because the insurance company can only sell
you a policy for more than you would have spent on
your own.
Now, it's true that insurance companies do play a secondary
role by allowing you and others to form a collective bargaining
group for medical services, thus driving costs down. However,
you could just as easily have an organization which only
provided a group buying function and not the insurance
function.
Posted by ekr at March 23, 2003 01:15 PM