If we’re talking about “don’t piss on my leg and tell me its raining,” don’t sell me “health insurance” that will leave me high and dry if I ever really need it.
Again, I'm not arguing against having health insurance be unlimited. I'm taking exception to your rhetorical mode, which I think is dishonest. By making the issue about the "big greedy insurance company," you obscure the fact that the public will be paying for these benefits. You're selling the public something as a "you can have your cake and eat it too" but that's a bill of goods.
For example, my private liability insurance (50 EUR/a premium) is limited to 50 million EUR/event. So, yeah, if I ever accidentally create 60 million EUR damage (in one fell swoop), I'll be broke.
My travel health insurance is 12.50 EUR/a, and pays 100% of medically necessary out-patient and hospital treatments (for an unlimited number of trips up to 8 weeks), as well as repatriation, without limit. (This works, presumably, because if shit hits the fan, they'll fly you home and hand you off to the normal health insurance).
I can't emphasise enough how good it is to be in a civilised society where the existential risks are covered and shared. Furthermore, because they are borne by someone (either insurers or gov't), there are also experts dedicated to managing them, and reducing them.
It all works because everyone is insured, so the insurers don't have to worry about adverse selection.
The problem is simple - in most developed countries, health insurance doesn't bankrupt the people it serves. It also doesn't have policy limits for common terminal illnesses.
So why does this happen in the US - a country with insanely high costs and relatively mediocre health outcomes?
The problem isn't insurance, it's the influence that unregulated privatised insurance has had on health industry costs as a whole.
Hospitals, medical professionals, pharma companies, and insurance companies are all primarily motivated by profit, and will price gouge patients to the maximum extent possible.
Insurance companies may be regulated intermediaries, but in reality many insurance companies are actually owned by hospital chains.
They simply provide a layer of regulated bureaucracy that disguises and legitimises the price gouging.
So while technically it's true that insurance companies have regulated margins, it's also a misdirection. The true role of the insurers is to provide corporate and bureaucratic cover for the outrageous sharking and exploitative profiteering in the rest of the industry.
Customers - i.e. patients - most certainly do not benefit from this arrangement. Shareholders and CEOs very much do.
Huh? In the US, Kaiser is the only integrated provider of insurance and healthcare that I know of. It actually is a fairly good model. Otherwise Cigna, Bluecross etc.. are strictly insurance companies that have contracts with other providers to provide care to their members.
Only a couple of countries actually have single-payer healthcare[0]. For those that do, treatment for complex, expensive conditions like cancer is regulated by the government much more strictly than in the US, with the result that patients have far fewer options for (covered) treatment. Incidentally, those countries, like the UK, tend to have dramatically worse cancer survival outcomes than the US does.
[0] The UK (if we ignore the divisions between the NHS in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) is one of the only ones.
Oh good, we're going to hash this out from the very beginning.