-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sun, Oct 22, 2000 at 12:33:39AM -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Nathan Saper wrote:
So these people are entitled to something for nothing? (or in this case, $1500 of treatment for $1000 of premiums)?
That's the whole idea of insurance, isn't it?
You're trolling, aren't you?
No, I'm not.
Insurance is a good idea for the insured because it takes money to make money. If you have any investments, any property, etc, which you *rely* on for your livelihood or your lifestyle, insurance is a way of knowing that you will continue to have, and being able to make plans based on having, those items into the future even if a disaster of some type hits. It's a trifle *MORE* expensive than just paying for the disaster, but it's money where you can budget it because you know when and how much you'll have to pay.
For catastrophic disasters, the insurance company often spends more money on you than you paid to them. Again, it's spreading the risk.
Insurance is a good idea for the insurer because the insurer does business with a large enough number of people that paying for the fifteen or twenty actual disasters that happen in a given day can be done routinely out of the fifteen or twenty thousand premium payments received that day, with some money left over for lunch. As the numbers get larger, the disasters become more predictable.
Nowhere in this business model is there any shred of entitlement or obligation. The insured is not entitled to coverage. The insurer is not obligated to write a policy on someone who has risk that makes the policy too cheap for the insurer to make money.
In theory, fine. However, we live in a society where people are not automatically given healthcare. If you don't have insurance, and you don't have the money to pay for treatment, you're shit out of luck. If the insurance companies deny treatment to people who MAY develop a disease later, they are setting these people up to die without healthcare. Maybe I view things differently than you do. I just think that in a country as rich as ours, we can afford to keep our population healthy.
Bear
- -- Nathan Saper (natedog@well.com) | http://www.well.com/user/natedog/ GnuPG (ElGamal/DSA): 0x9AD0F382 | PGP 2.x (RSA): 0x386C4B91 Standard PGP & PGP/MIME OK | AOL Instant Messenger: linuxfu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.5 and Gnu Privacy Guard <http://www.gnupg.org/> iD8DBQE58w2I2FWyBZrQ84IRAokDAJ9q0Qtq5tG6OBMTX5SDs6XEFmuwOwCfUEAb wv7pG0TF7S5wmDO36JYGRi4= =L/4o -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----