The "WAr On Women??"

[leo9]

the insurance business model works just fine for healthcare if people play by the rules, but they don't want to

That's because health and disease don't work according to commercial rules. To take a current hot issue: as researchers discover genetic predispositions to disease, insurance companies want to screen for them and charge higher premiums. From a business point of view, this is only common sense. From a human point of view, it's cruel discrimination against the sick.

as long as the rest of the block has the insurance, it's not their problem, as firefighters would be obligated to keep the fire away from those who did pay

A lovely example of the consequences of clinging to an ideology in defiance of reality. I can just imagine a firefighter's response if you told him to leave a house burning in the middle of a block for commercial reasons. Leaving aside the very poor chance of containing a fire by such roundabout means, if yours were the next house, the inevitable consequence would be that instead of a brief alarm while your neighbour's fire was put out, your house would be saturated with water as well as (at the very least) suffering major structural damage to adjoining walls. In fact, if the whole block apart from the one house was insured, the logical commercial decision would be to dynamite your house to create a firebreak; your house would be ruined anyhow, so best to get rid of it to save the rest.

In fact, it doesn't even make sense commercially: by leaving the uninsured house to burn, the insurers get at the very least the cost of two insured houses wrecked, plus just as much firefighting costs as if they'd tackled the original blaze. (Maybe more, the firefighters would be working for many hours to contain the fire that they might have put out much faster at source.) See what happens when you follow a theory ad absurdum?

[Punish_her]

That's because health and disease don't work according to commercial rules. To take a current hot issue: as researchers discover genetic predispositions to disease, insurance companies want to screen for them and charge higher premiums. From a business point of view, this is only common sense. From a human point of view, it's cruel discrimination against the sick.

and if they can't charge higher premiums for the sick, they must charge higher premiums for all, which means me, which means they're discriminating against the healthy because i almost never use medical services

[leo9]

and if they can't charge higher premiums for the sick, they must charge higher premiums for all, which means me, which means they're discriminating against the healthy because i almost never use medical services

And I'd guess you rarely need to call the police, so why should you have to pay taxes to support the police force? And you haven't had a house fire, so you shouldn't be expected to contribute to the fire brigade either. And foreign enemies haven't recently threatened you personally, so what are the government doing expecting you to contribute to the defence budget...?

[Punish_her]

And I'd guess you rarely need to call the police, so why should you have to pay taxes to support the police force? And you haven't had a house fire, so you shouldn't be expected to contribute to the fire brigade either. And foreign enemies haven't recently threatened you personally, so what are the government doing expecting you to contribute to the defence budget...?

once again, you dontseem to know what the word "insurance" means, or "risk averse" or "hedge"

[js207]

And I'd guess you rarely need to call the police, so why should you have to pay taxes to support the police force?

You pay more in higher-risk circumstances, yes: high risk events generally seem to pay for it, and of course more valuable properties pay higher taxes too. Just as smokers pay considerably more toward the NHS than non-smokers.

And you haven't had a house fire, so you shouldn't be expected to contribute to the fire brigade either.

My building's high risk - big gas-powered generators in the basement - and we do indeed pay a substantial amount extra to the fire brigade each year because of it. Bigger properties also tend to pay higher taxes generally, to fund such services, as well as being held to higher standards regarding fire alarms, extinguishers etc.

As for price: yes, the NHS is cheap. It's also very nearly killed me once due to inadequate staffing (or rather, politically skewed staffing: instead of a proper hospital, they were fighting to keep a "cottage hospital" open with no actual doctors in, hence no properly trained staff when complications occurred). I'd rather have an expensive system that doesn't kill me, thanks.