this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
700 points (96.8% liked)
Asklemmy
44176 readers
2012 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Insurance.
Eh, no, surely not. Pool the risk and only pay for your share of the risk. Somebody takes some risk in that, because statistics don’t always pan out, even at large, so the risk taker gets a return. Literally couldn’t be further from a “scam” - it’s one of the few amazing upsides to using money instead of bartering.
Sorry I should say "private insurance" specifically health-insurance.
Ah right. Yeah US healthcare is utterly fucked. I’m very happy to live in a place with decent public healthcare, even if the local government is trying to screw it over.
I think a basic insurance pool makes sense, but big insurance companies are quite far removed from being basic insurance pools. The whole industry exists to get people to sign up for policies they don't need, deny coverage to people to who need policies, and when someone actually makes a claim to find any and all possible ways to deny it.
In terms of denying coverage, that may be a U.S. healthcare thing. I’ve always found insurance companies reasonable to deal with, even when needs aren’t straightforward. For example, I’ve got a large family history of MS - getting illness cover was impossible via the standard route, but going through a broker many insurance companies were willing to insure me.
It seems a strange business that didn’t want customers.