What is the point of private insurance? This seems like a simple question, but after you think about it for a minute, you aren’t really sure anymore. The basic answer most people will give you is to pay for medical bills when you’re sick. But, why do insurance companies have to pay our medical bills for us? The goal of an insurance company is the same as any company: to maximize profits. So, wouldn’t it make more sense for an insurance company to pay for only the bare minimum of care in order to maximize profits? Hello class, welcome to Business Administration 101!
Insurance companies are the middlemen between health care workers and sick people. They don’t serve any other purpose or function than to take your money and try to pay as little back to you as possible. They don’t provide any care themselves, because insurance companies aren’t there to take care of you. They’re there to make as much money off of you as possible. Insurance companies can refuse claims, contest expenses, impose lifetime limits on care and flat out cancel on you when you get sick or lose your job. You know, when you could actually use some help.
It’s not like private insurance is all together terrible though. I mean, on top of all that, they also take 47 percent of your premium dollars and pump that into their “loading fees.” You know, the usual stuff, nothing too out of the ordinary. Marketing, profit, the $14 million salary of the average company CEO, those kinds of things. It’s no wonder insurance companies are sending lobbyists by the plane full to take out the President’s public option from health care reform. They don’t want to have to compete with the government for the healthy people they currently insure.
Since the government has already taken out 85 percent of the risk from the health insurance pool thanks to Medicaid, Medicare and the VA.
The public option does little more than create some more competition within the health insurance sector. If we have been able to trust the government to care for the elderly, the poor and the veterans of our nation for decades, why can’t we trust them to do the same for everyone else?
Pundits often talk about how expensive entitlements like Medicaid and Medicare are. Maybe when the government starts covering all the people in our country, not just the most chronically and seriously ill, these programs won’t seem so costly. Until then, the government will just have to continue doing most of the work, helping out all those sick people, while private insurance companies will continue taking money from the healthy and denying coverage to those who get sick. Remind me, what’s so great about private insurance?