[nebulousthree]

Because not-for-profit at least guarantees that the primary incentive is..not profit. Especially not profit over the well-being of the consumer.

Now, does that mean that the primary incentive will be the well-being of the consumer? Time will tell, and only if this initiative even makes it through.

[neverartful]

I'm surprised that there hasn't been more of a push for not-for-profit health insurance. A for-profit health insurance company has (IMO) unaligned motives with respect to well-being of the patient.

[bombcar]

Non-profit doesn't make the company (and all non-profits just are companies) suddenly good. It just removes one entity group interested in profiting - shareholders.

And it can introduce others who are interested in profiting - paying the C-level execs of the non-profit, etc.

Or introduce inefficiencies where the non-profit realizes that a "profit" is looming so they waste a bunch of money on stupid stuff to continue to not go over reasonable guidelines on rainy-day funds.

[HWR_14]

Not-for-profit doesn't mean the motives magically align. A lot of not-for-profit healthcare provided by hospitals in the US is Catholic-church affiliated. For reasons that have nothing to do with profit, there is a lot of healthcare (e.g. abortions, birth control) they refuse to provide.

[NovemberWhiskey]

>not-for-profit health insurance

Aren't there millions upon millions of people covered by non-profit Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans? BC/BS of Michigan is the largest insurer in the state with over five million covered.

[hibikir]

Not for profits are equally unaligned: It's just a matter that instead of giving money to shareholders, it's all about the whims of whoever controls the non-profit company. Those whims can be good, or they can be quite bad.

American insurance company profits are higher than I'd like, but ultimately the magic of America's healthcare is its inefficiency. When you end up owing $3000 for a very minor ER visit, the money didn't just go to the insurance company's profits: A lot of people made more money out of it than in an equivalent visit in, say, a hospital in Spain. And it's not as if the inefficiencies are just due to a single part of the healthcare system being worse all by itself.

The difficult part is that one person's inefficiency is someone else's lunch, or yearly safari to Kenya, so every move to cut costs is politically untenable. Non profits don't fix this, any more than non-profit colleges make US higher education cheap.

[JohnFen]

> The difficult part is that one person's inefficiency is someone else's lunch, or yearly safari to Kenya, so every move to cut costs is politically untenable.

I think calling it "inefficiency" whitewashes the real problem. That "inefficiency" leads to a much higher rate of unnecessary deaths and adverse health outcomes in the US than nearly every other advanced nation.

And often, even if you can get good health care, the financial consequences are devastating. Even if you have insurance.

[Zigurd]

Profit incentives and free markets work great when both sides of a deal can walk away. Most of us reading this work in software, which is in many ways an ideal free market product. But when one party dies if they don't buy, it's time to question market mechanisms.

[BSEdlMMldESB]

AFAIK there are for-profit jails and for-profit hospitals

I even think for-profit schools are a shitty idea, but this may be less obvious why

[ThrowawayTestr]

That's called single payer healthcare and most every country has it.

[msla]

> Because not-for-profit at least guarantees that the primary incentive is..not profit.

Look at how much the CEOs of non-profits make and ask yourself if you really believe that.

[HPsquared]

I'm sure the for-profit utilities don't use that as their argument. What is their argument?