There is No Hope - This Country is DONE!
Real Estate Investor · OH · Member since 2008 · 4k+ posts · 1k+ votes
I've sadly come to the conclusion that our country is done, over, kaput! I finally came to this conclusion over the weekend as we were circulating petitions to put a Constitutional Amendment on the November ballot in Ohio to stop Obamacare. As you know, I live in Ohio and in a somewhat rural area. This should be prime territory for conservatives. I was SHOCKED at the number of people that wanted Obamacare and many of these people should have known better. I heard comments like "now my son will have free insurance". It was absolutely apparent that these people think that Obamacare is free and comes from Obama's magical stash. They are too STUPID to understand that someone must pay for this stuff and there are a LOT of these people.
Therefore, I'm sorry to report that the USA as we've know it is OVER!
While I am not a fan of government subsidies, I do need to point out that pre-existing conditions are not analagous to getting car insurance after an accident.
Insurance is designed to transfer the risk of uncertainty in return for a fee - the premium. Once you have a car accident, there is little uncertainty over its costs (unless it is one of those rare accidents that results in a large lawsuit). It is therefore not insurable in the economic sense of the word.
Pre-existing conditions are different in a couple of ways. First, everyone is going to have some health condition at some point in their lives that would become "pre-existing" from that point onwards and therefore is not like an avoidable accident. Second, even after you have a health condition, there is a wide range of expenses that you can incur related to it. (For example, you could have hypertension and die of something else with no unusual expense related to your hypertension.) Therefore, pre-existing conditions do make sense for insurance coverage.
The reason why insurance companies have traditionally avoided covering pre-existing conditions is not related to their inappropriateness for coverage but to something called "adverse selection." This refers to the risk of the first insurance company that covers a particular risk ending up with all the people who have that condition, thus driving up its costs and premiums, and then losing all its healthy patients due to the high premiums, consequently necessitating it to raise premiums again, etc. This vicious cycle can continue until the insurance company goes out of business.
That's why insurance companies try to have a "healthier" patient base than their competitors and this also, unfortunately, creates a cycle of each company trying to have a healthier base than its competitors, thereby making insurance harder and harder to get for everyone. That's the situation we were in and a simple solution to eliminate the race to the bottom AND the problem of adverse selection is to pass a law preventing insurance companies from denying someone based on a prre-existing condition.
Insurance companies are actually quite happy with the rule that does not allow them to deny patients based on pre-existing conditions because it increases their revenues and profits. It makes perfect actuarial sense to them. The problem that I have with Obama's health care plan is that it does not do much to address the primary health care problem in this country, which is that costs have gone out of control due to a variety of market distortions.
While some people enojoy their self-appointed roles of fact-check police, others have the ability and duty to warn others of consequences for actions based on their knowledge of a certain topic. For example, if someone is burning a candle in their house in a way that is unsafe and can lead to a fire, the right thing to do is tell them. Especially if you are a firefighter! I would say "that candle will cause a fire!" It would not be my approach to say..."it hasn't started a fire yet, so I can't speculate that it will start a fire". Sorry, that's not the way I roll. Americans cannot afford to sit back, wait to see what happens, and then debate about what happened. They should be skeptical before handing over their money or supporting legislation.
Other points of interest include how you praised a post stating insurance companies would profit more by allowing anti-selection, yet can't back that up with any fact-checking that you like to impose on others. We're still waiting for that info. By praising that post, that means you support the statement. I figured at least one of you would be able to back up your claims...especially given the fact-check patrol environment recently.
Really? That's your argument?
You haven't been following the news for the past two years, have you?
"It's a potential loss, not a realized loss. "
No - if it's a pre-existing condition that means it's a medically documented condition, which means a doctor has written it down somewhere. Doctors get paid. That means it cost money. When money is spent, that is a loss. Just because an insurance company didn't pay for it doesn't make it a loss or not. The insurance company paying for is makes it a COVERED loss. There is such a thing as NON COVERED losses. It's still a loss.
"Ummm...assuming you believe that everything that has happened in the past/present is certain, and everything that happens in the future is uncertain, then you are saying the exact same thing."
Please put down the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and explain what you're talking about.
" Actuaries use data models to determine statistical risk to groups of people, not individuals."
Then there's no such thing as individual insurance?
"An actuary would never, ever say "I can predict with a great degree of accuracy what will happen over the course that individual's life." That's not their job, and not what they get paid to do."
LOL - you just quoted "About Schmidt" almost word for word when Jack Nicohlson was describing his job as an actuary to the African kid.
"Do you really think actuaries review individual applications from applicants and make decisions about premiums for those individuals?"
If they're wealthy enough and the exposure is big enough, sure. If the loss is big enough, you bet they do. I was on the actuarial team that evaluated the losses of the Raytheon executives that died on 9/11. They went through them individually. Everyone else, the agent can plug in the key individual data needed to find an individual risk profile for a person based on the data provided by the actuaries. You see, insurance companies have these neat things called computers that transmit, store and organize data.
J Scott has responded admirably to Tim's posts so I am going to pass on it. For what it's worth, my training in finance and economics is from a top university at the Ph. D. level and not from Wikipedia. I mentioned Google and Wikipedia so that those of you who wish to learn about the subject can do so and then the discussion could have been of a higher quality.
But it seems as if some people would rather hang on to their misconceived ideas than learn. Perhaps this is a manifestation of the low voter-quality problem that was discussed earlier in this thread?
Folks,
In the end what is going on here with this insurance debate is a key debate between private market insurance, which has been working just fine since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and social insurance, which works till you run out of other people's money. It comes down to capitalists vs. socialists and the field of battle is now insurance.
Those like myself and Rich who have actual experience in the field know the realities of this industry and how people behave when they file claims for payment by the insurance company and thus prefer the private market which maintains very large reserves while enjoying heavy profits of about 2.2%. Armchair academics who have no concept of the reality of this business often favor social insurance, completely ignoring the realities of the insurance business and base human behavior to take advantage of every loophole to tap out reserves, assuming someone else will (or obligating them to) restock them. You will notice how the armchair academics in this thread failed to even address the article I posted from the Casualty Actuarial Society. This is the level of their ignorance of the topic - that they ignore EVERYONE with experience in the field who says ANYTHING counter to what they already believe. It's an ideology to them.
Now, if the government takes the money, and sends it to the union leaders for their company, it still hurts the insurance company. If the government gives money to a financial insitution in order to create a cronie-capitalist situation, it hurts the original insurance company again. If they give the money to my poor renter (with three laptop computers and a big screen t.v.), it still hurts the insurance company. If they send the money to their co-op insurance pools, the insurance company still loses. See the pattern here?
I stand by my statement that we have a duty to be skeptical until the government blesses us with the knowledge of what they will do with the funds. Feel free to hold out for hope that they will give the money directly back to the privage sector insurers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2005/feb/12/weekend7.weekend2
the guy is so smart, but he can't drive a car or tell left from right. You can become president of the U.S. by being smart and becoming very educated, but it sucks when you can't drive yourself to the store to buy some ice cream. Different strokes.
Well Rainman really isn't a fair comparison... :lol: but I get your point.
I like his point he made about people who are "technically" disabled - that it shouldn't be a stumbling block. I know a paraplegic in Chicago who's a better investor than I am. He took every perceived disadvantage and turned it into pure, brass balls. Anyway, that's another topic for capitalists to encourage this guy to continue, and socialists to try to coddle him into uselessness.
Funny, in your last post, insurance was all about FUTURE costs, not past costs. Yet, here you're talking about past costs. Which is it?
Also, it doesn't meant that it cost an insurance company money at ANY point. I could have paid PAST costs with my own money.
When I apply for health insurance with a pre-existing condition, there is no past cost to the insurance company I'm applying to.
Just answer this question:
Is it possible that a pre-existing condition may never cost any insurance company any money at any point in time?
If the answer is yes, I've made my point.
I feel like I get dumber every time I read these sorts of posts... :roll:
"Funny, in your last post, insurance was all about FUTURE costs, not past costs. Yet, here you're talking about past costs. Which is it?"
I'm pointing out WHY insurance companies don't insure past losses - including the future effects of past losses. Learn the difference between loss and cost.
"Also, it doesn't meant that it cost an insurance company money at ANY point. I could have paid PAST costs with my own money."
As I already said - it is STILL A LOSS, even if the insurance company did not pay for it. A loss that insurance companies pay for is a covered loss, a loss they don't pay for is not a covered loss. Both are losses regardless of who pays.
"When I apply for health insurance with a pre-existing condition, there is no past cost to the insurance company I'm applying to."
There are future costs of past losses! Why is this so freaking impossible for people to understand?
"Is it possible that a pre-existing condition may never cost any insurance company any money at any point in time?"
Yes, you could get insured today with a pre-existing heart condition and shoot yourself in the head tonight. No money paid out for the heart condition. Try it. Let us know how it works out.
"I feel like I get dumber every time I read these sorts of posts..."
That's not a covered pre-existing condition.
Tim, I think you have misunderstood my posts. I am very much in favor of free markets and very much opposed to socialized anything. The problem with your posts is that you seem to look at an entire insurance industry from the perspective of your specific job within that industry whereas to solve problems with the structure of an industry, one needs to understand the overall functioning of that industry. We have a macro problem that needs macro solutions.
Your position is analogous to a mechanic at GM thinking that he knows how to fix the woes of the American automobile industry because he is an insider who knows more than outsiders.
I also think that one of the problems with the current right-wing movement in this country is an anti-intellectual bias that has become obsessive to the point that education and knowledge are considered negatives within that movement. The net result is that people who can argue most forecefully with little or no knowledge of a subject seem to dominate the public discourse. The sad thing is that people on the right seem to realize that the country is on the wrong path without understanding their own role in causing it.
Good grief and I thought Pentecostals were dogmatic.... These social insurance devotees continue to ignore the writing in front of them to try to tell me things in this very thread that are simply not true and easily read here.
Vikram: please show evidence to support the misconceived ideas on this thread (except the ones coming from you and J Scott). I'm also waiting for your supporting evidence that insurance companies will make more money when accepting anti-selective risks.
J Scott: Please show evidence that industry executives are asking for your opinion on how to run the "flip this house" industry. This is really the only way we can call you an expert in the field.
I would also like you to show evidence of the following claims, as you have said that you don't make statements that cannot be verified:
-"Plenty of part-time people....have opinions on how things should be run in the industry" How many people? What percentage? Please provide your proof.
-"too many people who think the McDonald's fry-cook must understand the....industry." who thinks this? Please cite sources. Or is this an opinion? Or worse yet...a speculation?
-"I'm just getting dumber reading this thread" please provide sources. You may use the fact that you lost the argument, that will suffice if you wish.
Thanks!
the real danger, Vikram, is when people who go to school think that makes them automatically educated. I went to school with some really dumb libs, and they actually passed their classes! Worse yet, they went out in the real world thinking their Ph D made them an expert in every industry!
WOW!! I just spent VERY valuable time to catch up on this thread. What a waste of time. The title of this thread has deteriorated into a typical debate and pissing contest by normal culprits"imo". Who knows what about insurance should be the new thread..
Just want newbies to be aware there are many more helpful threads to spend your time on, again, imo. Good luck to all. Rich
p.s. Are Jscott and Vikram one and the same? They seem to trade votes pretty regularly. Just an observation....