The Medical Freedom Channel

“Most efforts to improve the nation’s health care finance system involve tinkering with the present insurance-based model. Such efforts are likely to fail in the long run, because insurance itself is the wrong model for part of the system. An ‘insurable event’ — from traffic accidents to tornadoes — is something that: first, is very unlikely to happen; second, will come without warning; and third, is not something the person who is insured ever wants to happen. That definition applies well enough to such catastrophic health events as serious illness or injury. But it does not apply to routine health maintenance. The current health care system tries to finance both catastrophic and regular health care with one insurance system. This effort contains a built-in contradiction. The insurance system works best when the fewest people use it (i.e. make claims); the health care system works best when the most people use it. The goals are incompatible.” [editor’s note: yet another example of how this thinking is hardly new, especially with regard to separating “insurance” from the “insulation” function it now serves. - SAT] (04/01/2002)