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Comment by RandomInteger4 | Hacker News Reader

Why is there an enrollment period at all? Why can't you enroll any time during the year? This limitation makes no sense.

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It's one of the things that attempts to ensure that people don't forego insurance while healthy and only buy it once they get sick. You have to prevent that behavior if you want to also allow sick people to sign up without massive expense.

Or we just avoid this whole mess and go universal healthcare and stop treating health as a luxury.

But that would massacre the thousands of middlemen companies making a profit off the inefficiencies of this current govt-subsidizies-private-industry system.

Or we just avoid this whole mess and create a free market in health care.

I'd like to see people that advocate for this do it in a straightforward way and start by advocating for the repeal of EMTALA.

It doesn't make any sense to legally require stabilizing care and then do nothing to get people to participate on the pay side.

It really is telling that there is essentially zero advocacy for repealing EMTALA.

Unfortunately that doesn’t fix the mess of sick people dying of easily treated diseases because they don’t have enough money.

Do you have any examples? Which people, which diseases, and who denied them care?

Google “death due to lack of health insurance” for numerous examples.

If you want some specific ones here, consider a diabetic who can’t afford insulin, or someone with cancer who can’t pay for treatment.

If we’re talking about a true free market where ERs can turn people away, then it could be something simple like having a heart attack while you’re out and forgot your insurance card at home, or being mugged, beaten, and left for dead.

Exactly. Free market would turn it into care only for the wealthy while the poor die at home.

Even the wealthy should worry about such a world, since you never know when you might end up in the ER with no papers.

I did.

"death due to lack of health insurance"

4 results.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but I think it is important to ground this broader discussion in actual specifics. I keep hearing all these insane stories of people dying on the streets, which simply doesn't reflect anybody's lived experience.

Of course that's not to say there aren't significant real problems, but the discussion is so hyperbolic and far from reality that it's almost not worth having. This problem underlies both the "universal health care" and the free market absolutists. They're both selling different versions of utopia, which don't exist.

You kept the quotes on the search phrase and ignored everything else I wrote? You’re not arguing in good faith here.

Oh brother. I didn't ignore everything else you wrote. You presented hypotheticals and I explained how we need fewer hypotheticals and more grounding in reality.

Anything that can be prevented at a cost. Anything that seems like a less serious illness that wouldn't be worth missing a rent payment over.

You can get emergency care and just not pay for it if you can't afford it. You can't get preventative care if you can't afford it.

Sounds more like an argument for why we should move to single payer, because then the idea of random expenses from sick people signing up goes away, as we'll all have health coverage anyways.

There are plenty of eligible people that don't sign up for Medicaid. Single payer won't just hand wave away administrative problems.

Numerous people eligible for medicaid don't sign up because they try to and get turned away with some bullshit excuse about not filing the paperwork properly or whatever, either due to innocent bureaucratic bullshit or because the state is explicitly hostile towards government assistance.

With single payer, people wouldn't have to sign up; they would be signed up and have to opt out of they so chose. That's how it should work and it's not hand-wavy in the least.

I agree, but with the system as it stands now, that’s why this particular aspect exists.

Same reason that they don't want to cover pre-existing conditions. If you're young and healthy, you could forego insurance entirely until you got sick and then sign up. Or you could sign up for the cheapest plan and then flip to the most generous if you found out that you were pregnant.

It prevents people from waiting to enroll until they're sick.

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