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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I’m not saying don’t give care to folks. Just adjust premiums based on risk. If I picked up smoking my life insurance rates would go up nearly 5x. If I moved to a dead tinderbox forest my home insurance would increase 4x. If I get in an accident or get a DUI my car insurance doubles.

    It’s important to take risk into account for insurance premiums, because if you have more claims than you’re prepared for you run out of funds to pay for all the care. Whether it’s nationalized or a private insurance provider, the funds need to be there for the statistical average of care or reimbursement needed.

    If the funds aren’t there you end up with situations where folks just get booted off the insurance, or companies refuse to pay. That’s worse. That’s much worse than just paying more.


  • It’s all about stats though, rates. If you have two separate groups that are under insurance umbrellas. Say two separate companies all insured together. One tests with high likelihood for cancer, so across the large group of 5000 people you can be pretty sure about 500 will get cancer and or heart disease. The other only 100 out of 5000.

    Those diseases don’t account for all insurance expenses, so we’ll say 5 times the cancer rate means 3 times the total expense. If it’s costing three times as much to insure one group as the other, where should that money come from then? They either need to start paying more overall or folks will start being denied care since the funds aren’t there. Why shouldn’t the group pay more. But then, if it’s more expensive at group a, why wouldn’t those who are not predisposed jump over to group b?

    If the US nationalizes healthcare, it also seems unfair that California has to pay for the greatly increased heart disease and obesity rates of Oklahoma and Mississippi.

    I acknowledge this is a criticism of insurance as a whole, but we’re seeing these effects across healthcare but also home insurance from climate change.

    If I own a house in a forest that’s dried out and dying from bark beetles, sudden oak death, and drought, my insurance is going to cost like 5 times the average. And rightfully so.