The best cheap health insurance solutions

Private Health Insurance

admin — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:47:19 +0000

Private health insurance is the greatest source of health insurance coverage for people under age 65. Medicare, discussed in the next section, provides public or social insurance for the majority of people who are age 65 and older, as well as for people with certain types of disabilities, including end-stage renal disease (ESRD). In 2003, 68.9 percent of the population under the age of 65 reported some form of private health insurance coverage (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [USDHHS] 2005). Figure 3.3 shows the percentage of the population with private health insurance by age, gender, race/ethnicity, and various poverty levels. Children under age 18 below the federal poverty level had the lowest insurance coverage rates of any of these demographic groups.
Two types of private health insurance are available in the United States: individually purchased policies, which are usually limited in coverage and relatively expensive to purchase, and insurance provided as one of the benefits of employment. Employer-sponsored insurance is generally more comprehensive in scope because the risk of insuring is spread over a group of employees and because those in the workforce are generally healthier than those of working age who are not in the workforce and are not the dependents of an insured worker. Group insurance is thus less expensive per person than individual policies. In most cases, employers and employees share the cost of this insurance. Many employers are beginning to shift a greater proportion of these costs to their employees.
Individual policies are purchased by people who can afford them, who may be self-employed, who work in industries such as mining or fishing in which insurance is difficult to obtain, or who otherwise do not have access to a group health insurance policy. Individual high-deductible policies may also be purchased by people who do not anticipate much utilization of health services but want the security of catastrophic coverage. Individual policies often impose stringent limitations for preexisting conditions.

American healthcare needs to be fixed (2)

admin — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:39:35 +0000

So what about those politicians and policymakers, those charged by an angry public with figuring out what’s wrong with the healthcare system and then doing something to fix it? Those few who try to understand the healthcare system from a more global and less circumscribed viewpoint often become paralyzed by the chaos they find there. Examined as a whole, the American healthcare system is dysfunctional, operating under policies, traditions, priorities, and behaviors that are counterintuitive, counterproductive, and seemingly inexplicable. Smart politicians realize that tweaking policies in the midst of this bedlam - that is, instituting the simple solutions that many of their constituents call for - will make things worse. And they’ll be blamed. Their logical recourse is to take no real action at all but instead to utter
platitudes, point the finger at those in the opposing party whose job it really is to fix things (or whose obstructionism is preventing them from fixing things), and pray that the final healthcare implosion won’t occur until they are safely out of office, when it will have become somebody else’s problem. Given the chaotic nature of our healthcare system, this hot potato approach is understandable.
Another way of dealing with the current chaos would be to start over, completely restructuring the American healthcare system. Many Western nations have instituted fundamental reforms that render their healthcare systems more organized and equitable (while arguably less technologically advanced and innovative) than ours. None of these systerns is perfect - everyone understands that - but they are widely supported by their citizenries. Why can’t our leaders take one of these systems - the Canadian model is the most commonly proposed - make a few tweaks, and adopt it as our own? Read more about it in the book “Fixing American Healthcare”.

American healthcare needs to be fixed

admin — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:37:18 +0000

If you are a patient you might complain of avaricious HMOs, distracted doctors, or the difficulty of getting decent health insurance. If you’re a doctor you’ll carp about demanding and litigious patients or managed care organizations and government agencies that swamp you with paperwork and won’t let you practice good medicine. If you happen to be a managed care executive or a Medicare official, you will fume over doctors who use too much expensive technology on too many grasping patients - patients who (you’ll mutter) refuse to make lifestyle choices to prevent their expensive illnesses in the first place. If you run a biomedical company, you’ll bemoan the regulators who live only to prevent you from introducing your life-saving inventions to the marketplace. And if you’re one of those regulators, you’ll complain about a fickle public whose whining results in your being constantly hauled before congressional subcommittees, today for rushing unsafe products to market before they are fully tested, tomorrow for delaying the approval of critical medical products for the sake of your self-serving bureaucracy.
Like blind men feeling an elephant, we see the problems troubling the healthcare system as being narrow, well defined, tractable - and personal. We see solutions with a false sense of clarity: to fix healthcare we should institute universal cheap health insurance or pass tort reform or let market forces reign or loosen FDA regulations or tighten FDA regulations. And we have a hard time understanding why the politicians and policymakers refuse to institute whichever simple fix we’ve set our hearts on.