[throwaway173738]

I’m not understanding how this is better than just putting everyone in one risk pool and having the young and healthy subsidize the old and sick? You’re basically saying if you’re healthy don’t carry any insurance and just rely on the government and taxes for catastrophic coverage. And then as soon as you get sick you’re supposed to apply for this coverage that only applies when you’re sick? The biggest problem with Medicaid is that you have to prove you can’t get the means to pay for healthcare which is essentially impossible without paying for healthcare.

So now you have this huge apparatus for intake and for rejecting people who are not sick enough or old enough but who can’t conventionally afford care. And you have to pay for that apparatus. Why would that be any better for the young people, other than seemingly using their taxes to make cruel decisions about a portion of the old and sick instead of simply providing care?

And what’s worse is a lot of those sick people wouldn’t have gotten that sick if they could pay for preventative care. So now in your system you have this huge group of people who have through lack of means let their illnesses and maladies get so severe that they can’t afford to treat. The whole point of preventative care is to keep people healthy so they don’t become a cost burden to the insurer. That’s why we pay more relative to what it costs. And it’s a hedge for us. We might find ourselves among the desperate ill some day without the means to pay for treatment.