As business people, we should be looking at insurance for health like we do as insurance for everything else. What's it there for? Protect us from catastrophe, like falling through some guy's glass skylight, or accidently parking the bucket truck on top of his sprinker control box and it falls through the lid... Or, think of any other catastrophic accident, in terms of cost...
I don't know about you, but in my family, we evaluate our spending on food, cell phones, and other stuff on a regular basis. We have an item that goes to pay doctor bills. I haven't had insurance in years, but we do have a hundreds of dollars a month budget item. (there's 7 in the family). Imagine if used the insurance on the work rig to pay for having the tires changed, oil changed, washed, seat tear fixed, tuneups, and even brake jobs. Not only would your car insurance be stupidly high, we'd never care what the places charged to do the fixing, since insurance pays. As business people, we use our analytical powers to fix stuff, save money, etc. Apply it to health insurance. You KNOW you're going to spend money on it. Budget for it. But use insurance only as catastrophic relief, and find doctors, clinics, pharmacies that give you the best deal for cash, and take advantage of it. Since WWII, the laws concerning taxes and wage controls provided high incentive for employers to pay for health insurance as a benefit to be competitive. Now, everyone expects employer to pay the bill and health care should be "free" or close to it. Since that means YOU consume, the insurance pays, the doctor charges... You can fully understand why prices spiral out of control - there is no market forces to control prices. Every single payer health system in the world controls costs by simply deciding who can and who cannot be treated. It lacks any market forces to make anyone or anything competitive. And we've almost done that here, by removing the consumer from the equation. Imagine what kind of revenues we could generate if the government promised everyone broadband... the consumer used, we provided, beaurocrats pay. Either prices would spiral upwards wildly, or we'd start capping customers and limiting use to control OUR costs. The free market really does work. We use it daily in our business... Now imagine if we used it for health care, too. We know how to do that, don't we? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
