Insurance is, at its core, a reasonable halfway measure towards public control of a critical resource. If you need something only very rarely, but it’s something that needs to exist ALL THE TIME just in case, insurance allows you to pool your resources with other people in the same boat and afford to keep an industry around just in case. Somebody will always be using it right now, and it’ll be there when you need it, because you paid into the pool.
The problem is, as always, the insertion of capitalism into the solution. If someone has to profit from this set of relationships, the motivation to provide the resource is in competition with the motivation to extract more profit. This is what happened to healthcare.
Insurance is only a halfway measure because we already have an organization capable of managing common resources that individuals use only rarely but which the public needs all the time: that organization is the government, or the governments at various levels. We manage lots of things this way: fixing roads, stopping houses from burning down, pulling people out of floodwaters, that kind of thing. You don’t need it all the time, but it’s there when you need it because you’re paying taxes to a government that has no profit motive from it. Insurance should only ever have existed temporarily while government infrastructure was debated and organized, but the for-profit industry managed to capture enough of the government to keep itself alive indefinitely.
In short, insurance isn’t inherently bad, just not meant to be a permanent fix. Capitalism is bad.
Private insurance should only exist for things that are both a) completely optional, and b) not inevitable (so… evitable?).
Auto insurance? Well, if it’s the law to have it, why is a private company involved whose sole model is to collect money and deny payments?
Health insurance? Well, it’s optional, but you will absolutely need to pay for Healthcare at some point (or you die early). Why, again, should we put an institution in charge whose sole purpose is to make the average person pay more than they get out of it?
Famous athlete leg insurance? High value possession insurance? Have at it, private insurance.
Auto insurance being mandatory makes sense in that the wronged person shouldn’t have their life destroyed because someone can’t drive and afford to replace a car.
You’re right. Why would I want a public entity to keep any extra money in the country when I could pay a private mego corporation to funnel it off shore?
Why would I want to fund a public entity to keep publicly available records when I could pay a private company to deny my $1200 claim and boast $104 billion profit?
Is it the choice I get to make between 3 companies that all run the same statistical algorithm for risk assessment and collectively agree to have the same pricing? That’s so much better than having a government beholden to it’s voters and public option control it, right?
You are assuming that the government will run the insurance process competently. The government already is beholden to the voters and public opinion and they are just so efficient and devoid of red tape right? You’re also assuming the government will run the insurance industry as some sort of benevolent not for profit as opposed to a new form of tax. Not to mention what happens when the republicans get in and decide to raise insurance on electric vehicles or manipulate the price of insurance on cars from certain countries as a form of ersatz import tariff, or install political appointment figureheads who can take kickbacks to make certain manufacturers cheaper to insure. Not to mention the formation of a government department of adjusters and estimators to run the whole deal.
The existing system sucks buy I dont see the government having total control and no alternatives being some sort of magical panacea.
Insurance is, at its core, a reasonable halfway measure towards public control of a critical resource. If you need something only very rarely, but it’s something that needs to exist ALL THE TIME just in case, insurance allows you to pool your resources with other people in the same boat and afford to keep an industry around just in case. Somebody will always be using it right now, and it’ll be there when you need it, because you paid into the pool.
The problem is, as always, the insertion of capitalism into the solution. If someone has to profit from this set of relationships, the motivation to provide the resource is in competition with the motivation to extract more profit. This is what happened to healthcare.
Insurance is only a halfway measure because we already have an organization capable of managing common resources that individuals use only rarely but which the public needs all the time: that organization is the government, or the governments at various levels. We manage lots of things this way: fixing roads, stopping houses from burning down, pulling people out of floodwaters, that kind of thing. You don’t need it all the time, but it’s there when you need it because you’re paying taxes to a government that has no profit motive from it. Insurance should only ever have existed temporarily while government infrastructure was debated and organized, but the for-profit industry managed to capture enough of the government to keep itself alive indefinitely.
In short, insurance isn’t inherently bad, just not meant to be a permanent fix. Capitalism is bad.
Private insurance should only exist for things that are both a) completely optional, and b) not inevitable (so… evitable?).
Auto insurance? Well, if it’s the law to have it, why is a private company involved whose sole model is to collect money and deny payments?
Health insurance? Well, it’s optional, but you will absolutely need to pay for Healthcare at some point (or you die early). Why, again, should we put an institution in charge whose sole purpose is to make the average person pay more than they get out of it?
Famous athlete leg insurance? High value possession insurance? Have at it, private insurance.
Auto insurance being mandatory makes sense in that the wronged person shouldn’t have their life destroyed because someone can’t drive and afford to replace a car.
They didn’t say auto insurance shouldn’t be mandatory, they said that it shouldn’t be privately run
So it should be a government controlled monopoly?
You’re right. Why would I want a public entity to keep any extra money in the country when I could pay a private mego corporation to funnel it off shore?
Why would I want to fund a public entity to keep publicly available records when I could pay a private company to deny my $1200 claim and boast $104 billion profit?
Is it the choice I get to make between 3 companies that all run the same statistical algorithm for risk assessment and collectively agree to have the same pricing? That’s so much better than having a government beholden to it’s voters and public option control it, right?
You are assuming that the government will run the insurance process competently. The government already is beholden to the voters and public opinion and they are just so efficient and devoid of red tape right? You’re also assuming the government will run the insurance industry as some sort of benevolent not for profit as opposed to a new form of tax. Not to mention what happens when the republicans get in and decide to raise insurance on electric vehicles or manipulate the price of insurance on cars from certain countries as a form of ersatz import tariff, or install political appointment figureheads who can take kickbacks to make certain manufacturers cheaper to insure. Not to mention the formation of a government department of adjusters and estimators to run the whole deal.
The existing system sucks buy I dont see the government having total control and no alternatives being some sort of magical panacea.
A pedestrian can be involved in a car crash too.
Tonight, on Saying That Last Little Bit that John Oliver Can’t Say…