1. Point out to me where I used the word "cheat". 2. Apologize for your hyperbolic mischaracterization of my post, which you used as a technique to dismiss it out of hands. 3. See this comment deleted and never comment on my blog again.
Pick one and do it... I'm not going to fuss about which one you pick, but I'm not going to stand for this shit today.
"How can you say that firms are trying to maximize profit and are operating wastefully by employing lots of unneeded "middlemen"? Those options are mutually exclusive."
"How can you say that someone's following you and trying to kill you? That assassin stalking you would just get in his way!"
The firms are the middlemen I'm talking about. Under current economic conditions, it is necessary for most people to pool their money to share the risk of unpredictable health expenditures. A giant for-profit industry is not the best way to do this.
The regulations prevent "cheating". They don't prevent the insurance companies from providing less service for more money than is tenable, because we're in theory entering into agreements with them voluntarily. But the regulations also serve as a barrier to entry... today if a large enough group of citizens for it to be effective decided to cut out the middleman and pool their own money in a private insurance fund, they'd probably run afoul of the law for running an unlicensed insurance operation.
The market tends towards efficiency, but it doesn't tend towards fairness and it doesn't even tend towards the common good except in a shockingly Darwinian fashion... i.e., when it fails to serve the common good long enough, we have a period of upheaval and a correction happens. This could be society being crippled by a plague that could have been mitigated, this could be the economy plummeting past the point from which it can easily rebound due to lost productivity, medical bankruptcies, etc. This could be violent revolution.
If we're lucky, it could be people waking up to realize that the situation is untenable and intolerable and that it will correct itself if we don't correct it first.
Yes, the market tends towards efficiency, and right now the insurance companies are efficiently making money by efficiently denying services.
The insurance companies aren't cheating us. They're just not doing the job that we need them to do to survive as a society, and the market pressure doesn't exist to make them do it.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2009-09-02 04:42 pm (UTC)1. Point out to me where I used the word "cheat".
2. Apologize for your hyperbolic mischaracterization of my post, which you used as a technique to dismiss it out of hands.
3. See this comment deleted and never comment on my blog again.
Pick one and do it... I'm not going to fuss about which one you pick, but I'm not going to stand for this shit today.
"How can you say that firms are trying to maximize profit and are operating wastefully by employing lots of unneeded "middlemen"? Those options are mutually exclusive."
"How can you say that someone's following you and trying to kill you? That assassin stalking you would just get in his way!"
The firms are the middlemen I'm talking about. Under current economic conditions, it is necessary for most people to pool their money to share the risk of unpredictable health expenditures. A giant for-profit industry is not the best way to do this.
The regulations prevent "cheating". They don't prevent the insurance companies from providing less service for more money than is tenable, because we're in theory entering into agreements with them voluntarily. But the regulations also serve as a barrier to entry... today if a large enough group of citizens for it to be effective decided to cut out the middleman and pool their own money in a private insurance fund, they'd probably run afoul of the law for running an unlicensed insurance operation.
The market tends towards efficiency, but it doesn't tend towards fairness and it doesn't even tend towards the common good except in a shockingly Darwinian fashion... i.e., when it fails to serve the common good long enough, we have a period of upheaval and a correction happens. This could be society being crippled by a plague that could have been mitigated, this could be the economy plummeting past the point from which it can easily rebound due to lost productivity, medical bankruptcies, etc. This could be violent revolution.
If we're lucky, it could be people waking up to realize that the situation is untenable and intolerable and that it will correct itself if we don't correct it first.
Yes, the market tends towards efficiency, and right now the insurance companies are efficiently making money by efficiently denying services.
The insurance companies aren't cheating us. They're just not doing the job that we need them to do to survive as a society, and the market pressure doesn't exist to make them do it.