American Healthcare system micro-aggressions, or death by a thousand cuts | Hacker News Reader

American Healthcare system micro-aggressions, or death by a thousand cuts

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34 pointsAnneDev5 comments

Health "insurance" in general is a ridiculous concept. Insurance is supposed to flatten the cost of undertaking risky endeavors. Maybe there should be injury insurance for athletes, and STD insurance for sex workers. But the average human who jacks into the matrix for 18 hours/day is not taking any undue risk and should not need health insurance to get treatment for their cancer any more than they need murder insurance to pay for the investigation of their own death.

Capitalism is as faulty an ideology as any. Some things should not be for-profit. Healthcare is one of them.

Health insurance originally was for managing risk -- it only covered emergency healthcare like being in an accident or having a heart attack. But now we want healtchcare to cover everyday costs, including routine doctor's visits and daily medication like antidepressants or birth control.

Of course full coverage health insurance is going to be expensive -- if people are using it every month then it no longer distributes the occassional cost of an accident, but rather distributes the daily healthcare costs for routine care.

I'm really beginning to think that one potentially good catalyst for change would be if we could get a law prohibiting companies from providing health benefits.

Even if companies responded by increasing monetary compensation accordingly (unlikely!), the impact of every middle and upper class American having to go out and buy crappy health insurance, and actually hand over the cash for it themselves, might change a few minds about how we organize healthcare in this country.

Without also reforming healthcare up front, that would move a lot more people into the "y'know what, I'm better off without health insurance" bucket, which would accelerate breakdown of the health insurance market.

But I don't see why that would create the political will for anything to get fixed, given that it isn't being fixed already.

I'm a German that used to live in the USA for a while. I worked as an engineer in the US, with what would be considered "decent" insurance, and it was still crappy. You couldn't pay me enough to go back.

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