My first incomplete thoughts about something...

Getting something for nothing. The bastardization of the American dream.

We Americans generally want to believe that our future is in our own hands. That if we work hard enough and long enough, we will get what we really want: a comfortable home, enough to eat, leisure time, vacations, the good life. The American Dream.

But we also have another longing, as evidenced by the popularity of multi-million dollar lotteries and insipid TV game shows.…we want to get rich quick. We may believe in the Dream, but we really don't want to work for it.

Insurance companies have long played on this. Life insurance is supposed to be "income protection", a way of providing for the family should the breadwinner die unexpectantly. It's almost like winning the lottery…the family did NOT earn the money that the insurance company pays them; in a perverse way, the "got lucky" by having the coverage. In fact, whole life insurance purports to replace a family's "emergency savings" fund. Why save for a catastrophe when your insurance will cover it? Spend, spend!

Let's look at the flip side of this relationship. A family pays insurance premiums for years and never makes a claim. The insurance company reaps the benefit without doing anything. Something for nothing. Well, piece of mind, maybe.

Health care is the same. We have health insurance because we cannot afford medical care, particularly catastrophic coverage. So if we get very ill when we're covered, again, it's like winning at Las Vegas. That major surgery is covered, even though we've only paid a fraction of its cost in premiums. And the industry promotes this because on the flip side, they stand to make much, much more from the members that have good health, but pay anyway.

The only problem is that Life doesn't work this way. For every Cause, there is an Effect. The effect may be delayed, but it cannot be waived. Something for Nothing is an illusion…someone or something will pay the price, and in the healthcare industry, the chickens are coming home to roost.

In healthcare, there are a lot of healthy people who do NOT utilize the services, and a lesser number of not-so-healthy folks who DO. The non-utilizers, in effect, pay for the health care used by the utilizers. In order for a health care insurer to stay solvent, they must maintain a proper ratio of non-utilizers to utilizers. The problem is that the non-utilizers are starting to understand what their role is in this type of system, and they are now willing to change over to health plans that cost them LESS in premiums, but MORE if they actually had to utilize the service. That skews the profit ratio, as the population of non-utilizers begins to shrink, and that gives the insurer two basic choices: raise rates for the remaining members or reduce the population of utilizers to get the ratio back in order.

What we really need to do is get health care costs under control. The fact that a regular person CANNOT AFFORD to pay his own medical bills without the assistance of health insurance borders on the obscene.


More to come...
Paul