Politics and Medicine - Insurance is THE Health Evil!

Author

Insurance is THE Health Evil!

vjp2.at@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com

2006-08-28, 2:25 am

I see the health reform debate flaring up again. Personally I think
health insurance itself is a flawed concept . Teddy Roosevelt started the
FDA and ended the medical baccalaureate and the US Dispensatory, where a lot
of traditional remedies were found, on the grounds that anything that didn't
enrich the AMA was "snake oil". Then, we got health insurance to circumvent
FDR Galbraith wage freeze, then it was made tax-exempt. Then we got Medicare
and Medicaid, so the market is permanently skewed. Everyone is complaining
about the uninsured. Why? They are the only ones keeping the market in
check! Insurance is the evil! One third of medical costs are administration:
filling out forms! The real risk to the system is the emergency room and
long-term care. Folks should pay the rest out-of-pocket, even if they have
to go to India for surgery. Long term care, we have the nuring home
solution, of your putting everything you own in the name of the home and
however long you last. The emergency room is overflowing with folks too
cheap to buy an aspirin.

Instead of letting form-fillers, form-creaters, insurance salesmen,
employers, unions and others make decisions, why not pay your doctor an
annual fee and let the doctor cover risk with re-insurance. Mymom's uncle,
who was the village doctor, got paid annually, sometimes with farm animals,
for taking care of his neighbors.

At a meeting on health insurance in corporate finance transactions, they
were talking about it being worthwhile for firms with over a hundred employes
self-insuring themselves, with an administrator and a reinsurance cap. Our
"health" problem is really the sleazy way state regulators treat insurance,
milking them (think "Boss Hogg") for contributions the way they did with
banking before interstate banking was allowed. From my experience as a
central banker/regulator I know that states never wanted to have a fluid
national market so they could milk donations. Furthermore when the
constitution was ratified in the 1790s, the Treasury's offic of controller of
the currency handled all financial regulation before the New Deal alphabet
soup of independent agencies. What we are facing is an S&L type crisis in
insurance. They were saying that firms buy insurance they don't understand,
pay for things they never use, and that basically the market is inefficient
because no one knows much about the insurance. Just as on the medical side,
there is such a haphazard, inefficient, knowledge-proof way of making and
applying arbitrary rules perversely and inefficiently. Another remarkable
thing, given how states talk of wanting small business, is that "community
pricing" essentially locks in a high insurance rate for firms with fewer than
fifty employes.

I have always advocated moving ALL financial regulation (banks,
securities, insurance: SEC,CFTC,FDIC,NCUA,OTS,NAIC) back into the Office of
Controller of the Currency under Treasury (where they were in the 1790s)
instead of all these crazy little agencies. I wonder if you guys would see
the following change in financial regulation as MORE regulation or better: if
instead of FDIC and "Accredited investors" and Social[ist] [in]Security, we
got a single "Social Savings Account" and folks and their employers put in a
minimum in there under all sorts of insurance and restrictions, to cover
health, house, education, and retirement, and then after that, ANYONE can
become an "accredited" investor, or basically, one w/o restrxns. One of
FDR's unfulfilled pillars is socilalised medicine, with it the eugenics and
euthanasia the varmint mental geopagan left really craves for.

The world's biggest insurance market is too splintered Economist 12Aug06
For it is in Kansas City that the National Association of Insurance
Commissioners (NAIC) is housed. It oversees a market accounting for one-third
of premiums written worldwide.. changed dramatically since the NAIC was set
up in 1871.. Big insurers favour a version that would implement an optional
federal charter.. Premiums as a percentage of gross output are lower in
America than in several other countries.. The industry is also split: most
of the country's 4,500 insurers are small, and many of them have close ties
with state-based regulators, whose survival they support.. American
reinsurance firms have long benefited from a regulation that requires foreign
reinsurers writing cross-border business into America to post more collateral
than they do.. A majority of America's reinsurance cover now comes from
firms based abroad.. As a result of last year's devastating hurricanes,
reinsurance capacity is tight.. NAIC task force is now considering a
proposal to adopt a fairer rating system that would judge foreign and
domestic reinsurers on the same measures.. Swiss Re recently purchased
General Electric's reinsurance arm, and Britain's Aviva is in the process of
buying AmerUs, an annuity business, despite selling its property-casualty
business in America just five years ago.

- = -
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Reagan Mozart Pindus BioStrategist
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/vjp2/vasos.htm
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
[Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards]
[Yellary Clinton & Yellalot Spitzer: Nasty Together]

Nospam

2006-08-28, 8:27 am

vjp2.at@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com wrote:

> Everyone is complaining about the uninsured. Why?

Because health insurance it is incompatible with business practice.

george conklin

2006-08-28, 8:27 am

<vjp2.at@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com> wrote in message
news:ecu095$db9$1@reader2.panix.com...
> I see the health reform debate flaring up again. Personally I
> think
> health insurance itself is a flawed concept . Teddy Roosevelt started
> the
> FDA and ended the medical baccalaureate and the US Dispensatory, where a
> lot
> of traditional remedies were found, on the grounds that anything that
> didn't
> enrich the AMA was "snake oil". Then, we got health insurance to
> circumvent
> FDR Galbraith wage freeze, then it was made tax-exempt.

Bad history. Health insurance was the creation of the hospitals to
encourage use during the depression. Further, all alternative methods of
delivery other than fee for service had been outlawed by the political
workings of the AMA. It had nothing to do with wage freezes or anything
else. It was a deliberate political decision taken by organized medicine to
support its fee for service small business approach to medicine. It enabled
doctors to go from low income to the highest incomes of any so-called
professional group. Professionalization was for income.