People are making enormous amounts of cash BY HURTING OTHER PEOPLE therefore those people are evil.
This reasoning is unfortunate. Let me extend it and see where it takes us. Insurance companies, whose stated and logical purpose is to make money, are refusing to cover people like your daughter, are therefore hurting her and are thus evil.
I, every day, decline to pay for your daughter's medical bills or even contribute a partial payment. This is implicit on my part. I
could cough up some cash for you. I don't. By your reasoning, this makes me evil, along with every other human being on the planet. As evil as the health insurance companies if not more so. Unless, of course, you put me in a different category than the health insurance companies when it comes to moral obligation.
At what point did it become the moral obligation of the health insurance companies to pay for your daughter's healthcare? If they are obligated so to do, why are
you not paying for
their healthcare? Why are you not paying for
mine?
I suppose I shouldn't insist that my neighbor pay for my police protection, or my military protection, or my roads.
Not at all. These are common goods and benefit everyone. Those who use them and benefit from them should pay for them. How do I, for example, benefit from
your healthcare coverage?
The only way insurance works is that healthy people pay for sick people. And then when those healthy people eventually get sick, other healthy people pay for them.
Actually, no, that's not how it works. The insurance companies gamble that the money they collect from their customers, sick and healthy alike, will equal more than what they must pay for the care of the sick people according to their contracts. Enough more that they can meet operating costs and make enough of a profit to make it worth their while. The profit motive is the only reason anyone ever got into the health insurance business, exactly like any other business.
If everyone was in one big pool, costs would be lower.
Absolutely. And why are there no bigger pools right now? The government prohibits health insurance programs from crossing state lines. Which, incidentally, is untrue of auto-insurance.
The only way you're going to connect covering everyone to making money is if the government gets involved!
Huh? Expand your reasoning for me please.
A truly free market would dump sick people and cover only healthy people, because sick people are more expensive. It's common sense.
Actually, no. If health insurance companies behaved that way, dumping you the moment you got sick, no one would buy it in the first place. There's common sense for you.
I'm not talking about giving anyone anything for free. But mandated coverage will share the costs around, like you do with the police and the military.
You missed my point. It's IMPOSSIBLE to give it away for free, because it's NOT free. It always costs. All you're doing by getting the government involved is filtering taxpayer's money through the largest bureaucracy in the history of the world before it ever gets to pay for actual healthcare.
I would have no problem paying into a limited government-run health insurance program designed to cover the hard cases, like pre-existing conditions and people who actually can't afford private insurance, if it could be run efficiently. But, we already have those programs and they are not run efficiently. As you found, they suck. They're horrible, time-consuming, bureaucratic nightmares that provide sub-standard everything. If that's all you can afford, it's certainly better than nothing. But it's not exactly the best case scenario. And now we want to, essentially, expand those programs and penalize people for not participating? I would like to decline please.
Everyone I've talked to in Canada is very happy with their healthcare system. I think there is a ton of misinformation out there, and I don't know why people are spreading it or what they get from it. There seems to be a need to fearmonger.
Ah, so those articles I linked to were made up from thin-air. Well, I suppose that's possible. Or perhaps the misinformation is on the other side of the debate as well.
My car insurance company returns excess profits to policyholders at the end of the year, has done so for decades, and it was ranked #1 in the US in 2006 for overall customer satisfaction. It WORKS.
And was it necessary for the government to mandate that behavior as you claim it would be for health insurance? If it wasn't you've proven my point about the free market as opposed to government control. The auto insurance industry is far less regulated than the health insurance industry. So...what conclusions can we draw from that?