social insurance vs actuarial insurance

[Guest guest]

Which foreign country did you live in? They don't all have the same

system. I lived in Japan for many years and was insured under their

national health insurance while I was there. I had some good and some

bad experiences with Japanese doctors, the same as in the U.S. Their

system works quite well overall, and they have pretty good health

outcomes, generally far better than the U.S. Diet of course is also

part of it. Parts of their system that are more culturally bound, I

wouldn't want to replicate, and would be impossible to replicate

anyway because we have a different culture. Each of the other OECD

nations has a different system, you can't really generalize from your

experience that social insurance couldn't work here. That's in fact

how our system started -- social insurance -- it just never covered

the whole population. Now we've switched from social insurance --

where risk is pooled and everyone contributes pretty much equally to

the pot, knowing that they'll be taken care of when necessary -- to

actuarial insurance, where your particular risk is estimated and you

pay accordingly, as in car insurance. We end up with a system where

people who need insurance can't pay for it, they get sicker and need

it more, and become even less likely to be able to get a job that

could pay for it. We're more and more diverging into the haves and the

have-nots.

See Malcolm Gladwell's excellent essay on this topic that someone

shared, thank-you:

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2005/august/the_moralhazard_myt.php

Cheers,

Jeanmarie

On Aug 21, 2009, at 2:27 AM, slbooks4me wrote:

> I don't have insurance and am fully against it. Oh, and i can't

> afford to see a doc if i want to either as we are paycheck to

> paycheck. I did live in a foreign country for several yrs with this

> system and i saw it did ot really work as is ebing discussed. The

> nationals were thankful for american docs and a system that was not

> bound by the system. Not saying the one weh ave here is perfect, but

> at least we have rights to choose, there they do not and get what

> they are given period.

>

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> >

> > It honestly baffles me. You must all have insurance.

> >

> > This is a group dedicated to wellness and health, right?

> >

> >

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