Obama 'spincter' Tickle Causes Unaffordable Care.

[Restorium2]

But they don't go out of business they just raise the rates for everyone.  That's how insurance works.  The risk they took, others pay for.  and the risk involves pharma charging what they do for a fix.

What an insurance company should be doing is investing all that money they collected from me when I was healthy, and all the other healthy people, and safely invest it to pay their claims. And not bellyache and weazel when they finally have to pay some claims. They roll the dice with each person they collect from. Pharma charges what they do for the expensive medicine I take because they can. No one else makes it. So they go for the throat. At first the money paid for the research. But now, after 20 years of collecting, the research is all paid for and they are just being gready vultures. Edited July 28, 2014 by Restorium2

[Wild Bill]

Life insurance companies are betting that you'll live, you're betting that you'll die.

If you win you lose.

[mrd]

Insurance is their to pay for a calamity that you cannot pay for or do not want to pay for. It is an averaging of costs spread out to a pool of people who will sustain the burden of paying for the small number of people who will suffer a major calamity. It has existed since the 1400's. Your house burns down the whole town pays to get you a new house. Insurance companies have this thing called a ratio. If the ratio is above 100 it means that the money they take in in premiums exceeds the amount they have to pay out. That means that everything they make in their portfolios (mostly bonds) is theirs to keep. A well run or simply lucky insurance company can make mega bucks. but when a widespread calamity strikes such as hurricanes or 911 happens they can get hit hard.  

 

Some health insurance companies certainly gamed the system by refusing to insure anyone who remotely smelled like a bad risk ie preexisting conditions. The problem with that is you are left with a pool of folks who either do not have insurance or where the cost of that insurance is prohibitive. That is the go eff yourself version of insurance.

 

One question we might pose to ourselves is why go through insurance companies? They on average will take a 20-40% haircut off all monies for profit. This of course just makes insurance more expensive. Perhaps health insurance should not be a for profit institution.  If all Americans are of equal importance as citizens then perhaps like all the other industrialized countries we should have health insurance for all and it should be run by the government or by a company that is willing and able to limit itself to the 3% overhead that we see in medicare. It simply is more cost efficient. On other types of insurance then perhaps private and competitive enterprise might work well enough.  

 

As far as my own experiences go I was in two (don't drive with me!) auto accidents last year. In the first one I was stopped at a light and was rammed up the wazoo by an 18 year old who "was not paying attention" . His words. I suspect he might have been texting or whatever. The second one involved my rear wheel drive car loosing traction on a day where it just started to rain at a roundabout. My car was totaled due to the cost of replacing the airbags. (!)  The insurance co payed to replace my used car. In the first accident they sent me to their doctor who declared me just fine although I am not. They also avoided paying for medical bills. It turns out that if they do not pay and it goes over one year you get to pay for it. (PAY attention this could happen to you!) Fortunatly I found some lawyers who are now suing them over this before the clock ran out. But what a pain in the keester when we all pay extra in MI to have insurance pay for medical bills for the rest of our lives. Sometimes ins companies act like weasels.