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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

Having a critical mass of uninsured people is the foundation we need to resolve the healthcare crisis in America. Those uninsured people still need healthcare. If enough people start calling up small clinics asking for pricing, a cottage industry of small health providers will pop up to service these people with transparent pricing.

The insurance industry has perverted our healthcare system. The major reason doctors moved from private practice to being associated with hospitals is to simplify billing because health insurance companies look for any reason to refuse payment. To reverse this trend, we need more people willing to bypass insurance and buy healthcare directly.

Health insurance is a failed experiment. People should pay for their healthcare directly, and the government should provide for those who require serious, expensive treatments (after a payment that is some percentage of their income).

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>Having a critical mass of uninsured people is the foundation we need to resolve the healthcare crisis in America.

Thats actually exactly what I think the thought is for most people who advocate this...remove employer provided insurance and there will be so many uninsured that someone will have to do something. I think the hope is that something would be "Universal single payer healthcare coverage."

That may be right, but we already had 50 million uninsured american's and Obamacare barely passed and was pretty insurance friendly. I just don't see the political will to get it done, then we are just stuck with 40% of the currently insured uninsured.

Specialists that operate outside of most insurance networks, such as plastic surgeons do pretty well. As do specialties like dentists, orthodontics, and optometrists where insurance coverage is limited and a significant number of people pay out-of-pocket.

And I'd argue that the US is moving towards a similar system for healthcare. Lots of small clinics are popping up around the nation to provide limited care to individuals for price-conscious individuals.

What we need is something to cut the tether that insurance companies have. Insurance is nearly as important for determine the rates you pay for care as it is for covering costs.

> People should pay for their healthcare directly, and the government should provide for those who require serious, expensive treatments (after a payment that is some percentage of their income).

It's cheaper for the government to pay for everything. If you incentivize skipping check-ups and minor treatments they turn into large expensive care.

The rest of the western world has had universal health care for ~50 years now and it works better in every other western country than it does in the US. The US should just choose a country and copy it.

> The US should just choose a country and copy it.

Just because X policy works elsewhere doesn't mean it would have the same effect in another country.

No, but the fact that it does work somewhere gives it a huge advantage over completely untested plans.

> and the government should provide for those who require serious, expensive treatments (after a payment that is some percentage of their income).

I'm for it as long as it doesn't involve the government micromanaging how the health care providers perform their services. This is a problem with all health insurance, public or private, but the micromanagement is done on a more direct level with government-provided insurance, with doctor report cards and so on. They do this now for at least some Medicaid and Medicare implementations, and some of the provisions of Obamacare even accelerated this process.

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