For sure - it's kind of absurd because healthcare costs are an inevitability.
With car and home insurance, the products can go their entire lifecycle without burning down, being robbed, or smashing into a tree.
With healthcare, a person is going to need it, and it incapacitates them when they don't get it. Personally I'm for treating healthcare as we treat most regional monopolies that everyone needs - make it a public utility. You'll need healthcare just like you'll need water and electricity.
> With healthcare, a person is going to need it [...]
Not really, at least not at the current stage of technology.
During most of your life, healthcare is more like a lottery, ie you might never need it.
When you are old, something will eventually get you. And a lot of health care costs are spend on these end-of-life conditions. Alas, our massive spending at the end doesn't actually help very much: they mostly give you a few more month of suffering. (For things like cancer etc.)
For a lot of people hospice care is both cheaper and provides a better quality of life. (Some in-law of mine went from hospital care to hospice care when the cancer treatments got worse than the disease.)
So you're saying that you don't eventually need healthcare, except for when everyone needs it then it's the most expensive?
That's like saying you don't really need electricity until later in the day, when it's more in demand for everyone. Should we treat electricity use as a lottery?
In fact, people should be using healthcare more, as a preventative measure (for reasons you just said), but because we treat it like car accidents and house fires and lotteries it's stuck in remedial mode.
>When faced with a terminal illness, medical professionals, who know the limits of modern medicine, often opt out of life-prolonging treatment. An American doctor explains why the best death can be the least medicated – and the art of dying peacefully, at home
To be clear, there are a few different kinds of health care along multiple dimensions, like
- price
- expected mean utility (as measured in quality adjusted life-years gained)
- variance of utility (which I am ignoring here)
I am saying that at current state of technology, if we exclude the expensive stuff with near zero or even negative utility, the remaining demand for big items fits an insurance model rather well.
Yes, I agree that we should probably do more preventive interventions---like exercise, decent nutrition, vaccinations, etc. These are mostly cheap.
And even though they are good for people already, the insurance company might very well decide to just pay for them (and perhaps even pay people extra on top with discounts etcs to nudge them even more) to save itself money in the long run.
EDIT: There's of course also expensive treatments that provide a lot of quality adjusted life years, but the need for these are more like a lottery. (Eg treatment after a car accident or massive burn, or certain treatable cancers.)
With car and home insurance, the products can go their entire lifecycle without burning down, being robbed, or smashing into a tree.
With healthcare, a person is going to need it, and it incapacitates them when they don't get it. Personally I'm for treating healthcare as we treat most regional monopolies that everyone needs - make it a public utility. You'll need healthcare just like you'll need water and electricity.