An Insurance Mess
Comment:
“John Gilmore once explained to me how he manages his health care. He’s self-employed and pretty well-off, but he’s also incredibly smart and very good at cost-benefit analysis. John’s approach (if I recall correctly) is to take out disability insurance and catastrophic injury/illness insurance, both of which are relatively cheap. Then he pays cash for *everything* else – and negotiates a cash discount for all the services he uses. He’s pretty confident that this is much cheaper than any private health insurance he’d get, and unlike an insured patient (who is a pain-in-the-ass liability for a PCP, who has to deal with the insurer to get paid), John is a paying customer with the power to take his business elsewhere, who represents cash-on-the-barrelhead for each visit, and that means his doctors treat him like a VIP, not an inconvenient hassle.”
…from a blog post on the mess of a system that is insurance in America – the write is the wife of the guy who runs kottke.org.
I find it terribly sad that we can’t fix this because of ideological rigidity.
08/15/2011