re: #9 Obdicut

No. The pool remains the same. I’m not sure why this is so hard to understand.

If an insurance company cannot be profitable while actually paying for treatment for sick people, then it is not really a health insurance company.

This, more than anything else, shows the parasitic nature of health insurance companies. They provide nothing. They only take profits out of the system. They only want to take profit. They have no incentive to actually provide service.

The pool EMPTIES if everybody can swim only when they need to. Who is going to be foolish enough to pay premiums year in, year out, when they can join the pool when they need the coverage, and abandon membership when they don’t?

NO insurance company can come anywhere near breaking even if its insured pool consists only of the desperately ill. No healthy person has any reason to buy insurance while healthy, if they are guaranteed they can get coverage once they get sick.

Put these two facts together, and you’ve got a recipe for breaking all health insurance coverage.

As things NOW stand, a large number of healthy people buy coverage. Some of them then get sick, and they do get treated, and the premiums of those who had better health luck pay for that treatment. On average, everybody pays for his own medical costs, but that average includes many people whose illnesses were brief and cheap, as well as a few whose medical needs were much more severe and expensive.

Health insurance companies do provide benefits. That’s where most of the premium money goes. Some of it goes to keeping track of the paperwork, so as to keep a lid on fraud. A little of it goes to profits; health insurance is not now much of an investment.

Your notion that health insurance companies keep the money for themselves and never pay up when medical care is needed is mostly false. Once in a while, insurance companies go rogue. An Enron or a Bernie Sanders situation can occur with health insurance, and THAT is where government ought to step in. Insurance law does not allow for dropping somebody from coverage when they get sick on some trifling pretext. To do so is fraud and should be both forbidden, and punished.