05-04-2017, 03:06 AM
(05-03-2017, 05:06 PM)Benton Wrote: Yours sons (and my uncle who died two years ago from renal failure associated with childhood diabetes) situation isn't what I think the lawmaker was referring to. I think he was saying people who take some risks are more likely to develop some health problema.
I'm a proponent of some type of insurance coop.
(05-03-2017, 05:55 PM)Dill Wrote: My daughter developed leukemia when she was 4 1/2 years old. She was cured in a German hospital. Now she is 35 years old. A brush with cancer like that is what insurers have labeled a "pre-existing condition" for decades. Jimmy Kimmel's son's heart valve condition would be another example. If your parents and your brother died of cancer, that would put you, for insurers, in a higher risk pool no matter how great your life-style choices were.
If the good Representative from Alabama wants us talking about how life-style choices create a pre-existing conditions, I think it is to moralize medical issues to the point enough people feel comfortable moving back to the old system, which excluded those with pre-existing conditions or charged them prohibitively high premiums. "Personal responsibility"=greater profitability if people can be blamed for their conditions. People who don't have pre-existing conditions--or none that they know of yet--then come to see those with pre-existing conditions as the "problem"--not the Freedom Caucus and insurance companies.
This could be a new variation on the cookie joke: An insurance company CEO, a healthy client, and a client with a pre-existing condition are all sitting around a table upon which sits a dish with 12 cookies. The CEO grabs 11 cookies, then leans over to the healthy client and whispers "Watch out! that sickie wants half your cookie."
By the way, German insurance, for middle and lower income earners, is coop--perhaps one reason why healthcare there is half the cost per capita and just as good. How is it that they cover everyone for everything--even smokers--without seeing their costs "skyrocket"?
(05-03-2017, 06:06 PM)Benton Wrote: I think a coop would fix a lot of our problems. Or at least step in that direction without totally abandoning insurance and medical providers' free market right to possibly make you give up everything you have or die. If people still wanted to take advantage of that model-- as lawmakers assure us they will -- them they can. For those that want cheaper coverage, they can coop.
(05-03-2017, 10:45 PM)Benton Wrote: Yeah, that flies in the face of a half century of research. Could be accurate, but it's going to take more than one study for me to think cancer is just bad luck. And it's anecdotal, but I love near the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant. Cancer rates there are something like 3 out of every 5 workers. The likelihood that that many random people went to work for the same employer is insane.
Coops can take a lot of forms. I think ideally private companies should try to get business as opposed to setting what their profit margin should be and working out from there.
(05-03-2017, 10:45 PM)Benton Wrote: Yeah, that flies in the face of a half century of research. Could be accurate, but it's going to take more than one study for me to think cancer is just bad luck. And it's anecdotal, but I love near the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant. Cancer rates there are something like 3 out of every 5 workers. The likelihood that that many random people went to work for the same employer is insane.
Coops can take a lot of forms. I think ideally private companies should try to get business as opposed to setting what their profit margin should be and working out from there.
Sorry I hate when I don't know something that I feel like I should know...but what the hell is a coop?
