What’s Wrong With Health Insurance in America?
Published: October 17, 2016
Reforming health insurance in this country begins with redefining our understanding of what insurance is and what it supposed to cover. Insurance isn’t for routine or predictable expenses. Over time, we have come to expect all of our health care to be provided through insurance, and covering more has helped make health insurance cost more.
Discussion Questions
As health insurance continues to get more complicated and expensive, we’re all left thinking the same thing: There has to be a way for people to get health care at a more affordable price.
Luckily, there are ways to make health care more affordable without jeopardizing quality or access.
That process begins by redefining our understanding of what health insurance is, and what it is supposed to do.
Insurance in general is meant to protect you from expensive and unexpected events, not routine or predictable expenses.
Home insurance doesn’t cover the things like replacing light bulbs or old kitchen appliances that break down. It kicks in when a pipe bursts or a tree “remodels” your living room.
And you’d never expect auto insurance to pay for gasoline or car washes. Insurance is there for the big events, to protect you from financial catastrophe.
But over time, health insurance has been broadened to cover more routine and predictable expenses, and even services you may never need.
But COVERING more COSTS more. So health insurance prices have gotten higher and higher, in order to pay for things that insurance was never meant to cover.
The first step in bringing costs down, is to refocus coverage on emergency and catastrophic events, so that health insurance functions like true insurance again.