Robert Reich: A single-payer health care system is inevitable - Salon.com - 1 views
www.salon.com/...e-system-is-inevitable_partner
health care market fundamentalism oligopoly economics
shared by Javier E on 27 Aug 16
- No Cached
-
In a nutshell, the more sick people and the fewer healthy people a private for-profit insurer attracts, the less competitive that insurer becomes relative to other insurers that don’t attract as high a percentage of the sick but a higher percentage of the healthy.
-
If insurers had no idea who’d be sick and who’d be healthy when they sign up for insurance (and keep them insured at the same price even after they become sick), this wouldn’t be a problem. But they do know — and they’re developing more and more sophisticated ways of finding out.
-
Health insurers spend lots of time, effort and money trying to attract people who have high odds of staying healthy (the young and the fit) while doing whatever they can to fend off those who have high odds of getting sick (the older, infirm and the unfit).
- ...6 more annotations...
-
As a result we end up with the most bizarre health-insurance system imaginable: One ever better designed to avoid sick people.
-
In reality, they’re becoming huge to get more bargaining leverage over everyone they do business with — hospitals, doctors, employers, the government and consumers. That way they make even bigger profits.
-
researchers found, for example, that after Aetna merged with Prudential HealthCare in 1999, premiums rose 7 percent higher than had the merger not occurred.
-
The real choice in the future is either a hugely expensive for-profit oligopoly with the market power to charge high prices even to healthy people and stop insuring sick people.
-
Or else a government-run single payer system — such as is in place in almost every other advanced economy — dedicated to lower premiums and better care for everyone.