Originally Posted by
xjx388
Look at car insurance. It doesn't pay for your preventive maintenance and routine breakdowns. It covers when something really goes wrong. Insurance covers, for the most part, catastrophic occurences. Not so in the Health Insurance segment. We expect it to cover our preventive care and most of our routine healthcare costs. What it used to be, for the most part was indemnity plans: They didn't cover until a certain deductible was met and only then, they only covered a percentage. And you paid the doctor directly and got reimbursed by the insurance.Indemnity was the predominant form of health insurance until the mid 70s with the passage of the HMO Act of 1973. Before that there were a few scattared HMOs around, like Kaiser Permenente. Then, in the early 80's PPOs became prevelant. And here we are today.
Maybe it is, but I don't think it's as easy to do at this point in time as it might have been had we followed the rest of the world after WWII.
You keep going on about car insurance. I'm 57 live in the UK and have never learned to drive and therefore never owned a car or driven a car or paid insurance on a car. At 57 I am now going to the doctor more, need more medicines, need more help. I can't decide not to do that if I want to live. I pay a little more in taxes, I pay nothing for health insurance outside my general taxation and I'm damn sure I am better off in medical terms than your average USA citizen.