I was listening to the Acquired episode on Epic and they touch on the severe cost overruns in our healthcare system. They make a point to share that hospitals aren’t the ones making a killing. It’s insurance companies.
They make a compelling argument that if you add up the total that you pay to insurance, taking into account what your employer pays, there’s no way you get that much value out of your health insurance annually.
That’s kind of interesting because I used to work in health insurance (mental health specifically, so it has its own quirks), and it felt like things were always in financially dicey territory. It must be different in medical.
The costs are inflated for sure, but compared to to cost of paying for cancer treatment entirely out of pocket, it’s still cheaper. That’s the whole point of insurance, to cover the event of a catastrophic cost.
I’m not as sure about that. If you paid your premiums, etc. into a low yield savings account, especially when you start when you’re young, I think the value proposition would be more than insurance where you have no way to control payment decisions.
Please do not read this as me saying don’t get insurance. Read it as our insurance is failing to provide the value that we pay into it and need something better.
The Acquired episode goes into detail how we ended up with a private payer system and it’s so infuriating. Our health system was being set up around the same time as the UKs and they show how different incentives lead to where we are.
Why do you think the cost of paying out of pocket is so high? Private insurance bears a significant part of the responsibility for causing that problem.
Structurally, yes, you need a system that amounts to healthy people saving, and sick people being taken care of from those savings, whether it’s individual or social. But our current system of private for-profit insurance is about as bad as such a system could be while still technically sorta working.
I was listening to the Acquired episode on Epic and they touch on the severe cost overruns in our healthcare system. They make a point to share that hospitals aren’t the ones making a killing. It’s insurance companies.
They make a compelling argument that if you add up the total that you pay to insurance, taking into account what your employer pays, there’s no way you get that much value out of your health insurance annually.
It’s a metaphorical gun to the head. It’s not designed to help. The purpose of the system is what it does.
That’s kind of interesting because I used to work in health insurance (mental health specifically, so it has its own quirks), and it felt like things were always in financially dicey territory. It must be different in medical.
The costs are inflated for sure, but compared to to cost of paying for cancer treatment entirely out of pocket, it’s still cheaper. That’s the whole point of insurance, to cover the event of a catastrophic cost.
I’m not as sure about that. If you paid your premiums, etc. into a low yield savings account, especially when you start when you’re young, I think the value proposition would be more than insurance where you have no way to control payment decisions.
Please do not read this as me saying don’t get insurance. Read it as our insurance is failing to provide the value that we pay into it and need something better.
The Acquired episode goes into detail how we ended up with a private payer system and it’s so infuriating. Our health system was being set up around the same time as the UKs and they show how different incentives lead to where we are.
Why do you think the cost of paying out of pocket is so high? Private insurance bears a significant part of the responsibility for causing that problem.
Structurally, yes, you need a system that amounts to healthy people saving, and sick people being taken care of from those savings, whether it’s individual or social. But our current system of private for-profit insurance is about as bad as such a system could be while still technically sorta working.