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Comment by sgift | Hacker News Reader

German socialist health care saved my life without bankrupting me (I've seen the bills) - so: I take my chances.

And US health insurance does the same without the high taxes. What is your point?

1. Good insurance is unavailable to many, many people in the US.

2. Good insurance is extremely expensive. If your premiums for good insurance are low, that just means your employer is paying a lot. I don't see much substantive difference between paying high premiums and paying high taxes.

How much does good insurance cost?

Anecdata: most of my employers have offered good (but not the best) insurance. If you didn't use it, the employer and employee contributions together were probably something like $10k-$15k. If you did use it, the employee contribution would be capped at something like $20k-$30k, but the employer contribution would be uncapped. Somewhat famously, the CEO of AOL (?) talked about spending $1,000,000+ on an employee's neonatal care.

...except when it kicks you to the curb, and forces you to fight over what they'll cover while your family's in the middle of the hardest time of their life and has negative energy to spare.

Our healthcare/insurance system is miles better than nothing, but that's no reason to stick our heads in the sand and insist that it's especially good by modern standards.

How about if you had the bad luck of having pre existing conditions which no insurer will touch. Here you still get all the help you need. What happens over there? I ask as I do not know, however, if I see comments here I think you are screwed. Which is not fair Imho.

That still seems like a problem that the market can solve somehow without nationalizing an obscene amount of the US economy. We need to look at the insurance industry from the standpoint of how they are growing profits, who is getting the big paydays for it, and how much lobbying is done on their behalf. Because I recall as a kid growing up in the 1980s that health insurance was not that big of a deal to my parents who were of modest income and so there must be a reason why. I think that reason is that insurance, like every place a big pot of money exists, was "financialized" by the usual suspects.

But how can insurance not be perverse? If it is not nationalized then it is a private company that needs to make profits. And when you have that incentive, it is all about stats and risk. I find it a difficult problem to mix with capitalism. I have been raised in Europe and for me it is natural that one can go to the doctor 'for free' (if you cannot pay for it); I am trying to reason how insurance would ever work unless (like in NL) insurers must accept everyone no matter what happened before. How would that work? Is it not better for the insurance company to have people without money die? How can that fit?

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