[brettproctor]

Understanding the root cause of how our healthcare system developed is both crucial and completely lacking from most of these discussions.

It is a tale of federally mandated wage control and specialized tax breaks. A quick google will show many articles outlining how we got here.

Why is car insurance not tied to employers? In general how much better does car insurance work than health? Are the prices not much more straightforward and is it easy to shop around? If you are treated poorly by your car insurance company, can you easily tell all your friends and change companies?

This is the real problem here. Most folks have no choice and no skin in the game, which leads to all these crazy stories about zero pricing information and no ability to change companies.

If the tax breaks simply got removed, and people had to actually pay directly for their insurance and could switch companies, the vast majority of these problems would go away.

[custos]

Car insurance is not comparable to health insurance. It's apples to oranges. Car insurance reduces risk, by exchanging the cost of an unpredictable potentially costly event (an accident) for a regular much reduced cost event (monthly payment). The benefit is predictable expenses and budget.

Health insurance only works this way for the healthy. For the chronically ill, it's flat out cost reduction to have it and a profit loss for the insurer.

My insurance pays out more than I pay into it every year. I had one year it paid out ~$250k.

Unless we stop mandating care for the sick unable to pay for it, healthcare is socialized; it's just a matter of how efficiently socialized it is.

Insurance companies overcharge the healthy to make up for their losses with the chronically ill, and hospitals overcharge those who can pay to make up for their losses with those who can't.

Really just need to cut out the middle men.