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By Robert Reich
In a nutshell, the more sick people and the fewer healthy people a
private for-profit insurer attracts, the less competitive that insurer
becomes relative to other insurers that don’t attract as high a
percentage of the sick but a higher percentage of the healthy.
Eventually, insurers that take in too many sick and too few healthy
people are driven out of business.
If insurers had no idea who’d be sick and who’d be healthy when they
sign up for insurance (and keep them insured at the same price even
after they become sick), this wouldn’t be a problem. But they do know –
and they’re developing more and more sophisticated ways of finding out.
It’s not just people with pre-existing conditions who have caused
insurers to run for the happy hills of healthy customers. It’s also
people with genetic predispositions toward certain illnesses that are
expensive to treat, like heart disease and cancer. And people who don’t
exercise enough, or have unhealthy habits, or live in unhealthy places.
So health insurers spend lots of time, effort, and money trying to
attract people who have high odds of staying healthy (the young and the
fit) while doing whatever they can to fend off those who have high odds
of getting sick (the older, infirm, and the unfit).
As a result we end up with the most bizarre health-insurance system
imaginable: One ever more carefully designed to avoid sick people.
full:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/aetna_shows_why_we_need_a_single_payer_20160817
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