[kscaldef]

> And most companies have good health coverage for the cancer.

Well... kinda. One of the dirty little secrets of employer-provided group health care is that when you have one person whose health care costs vastly exceed the average, there's enormous pressure to get that person out of the "group". I've know companies where someone got cancer and the premiums for the whole company doubled the next year.

[jimbokun]

This is a good economic explanation for why national health care systems should outperform employer based (or any other) systems. You can't get a larger pool of people to spread risk around, under a single legal framework, than an entire nation state.

[kscaldef]

It's not really about the overall performance or cost of coverage. The advantage, in this case, of national health care is that you can't be kicked out of the "group" (i.e. fired because you're raising the insurance premiums for the whole company), and there's no concept of "uninsurable".

[yummyfajitas]

Once you look at the numbers, you realize that beyond a certain size it doesn't matter much.

The standard deviation of health care costs for a company scales like 1/sqrt(# employees). Once (sigma cost) / sqrt(# of employees) << (mean cost), there is little advantage to having a bigger pool.

[orangecat]

Geez. I never thought about that scenario, but it makes perfect sense. So much for the one possible advantage of employer-based health insurance.

[nerfhammer]

Here's a disturbing tale of this scenario playing out: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/7/751100/-How-I-los...