re: #10 lostlakehiker

The pool EMPTIES if everybody can swim only when they need to.

Meaningless analogy.

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?

People who use medical care. Like, most people.

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.

Only if medical insurance is just about catastrophic care. But it’s not. I have no idea why you’re pretending that it is, except that being dishonest is the only way you can make your argument.
\

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.

No. You don’t understand, at all. Being a private company, rather than a public one, brings no benefit. There is nothing for the profit motive to do, for health insurance companies, except to give them an incentive to screw people over. In most industries, the profit motive gives an incentive to innovate, to create efficiency. In health insurance, it’s the opposite.

Your notion that health insurance companies keep the money for themselves and never pay up when medical care is needed is mostly false.

Lying about what I said is stupid of you. I said they had an incentive to keep money when possible.

You have to lie to make your argument. That should really tell you something.

Tell me this: Explain an innovation that the Health Insurance industry has brought to us. Explain something a private health insurance company came up with that was of value to something other than itself. That was of value to its consumers. Something that isn’t provided by a public form of health insurance.