[sarchertech]

You can deduct some of your medical expenses. I think it’s over 7.5% of your AGI.

But tax deduction or not isn’t what makes individual health insurance so expensive. When you have employer provided health insurance you’re in a completely different risk pool than people buying on the open market.

[maerF0x0]

> completely different risk pool

And that's the issue, we need regulation to break the quid pro quo system we have right now, and an innovative enterprise to design and sell a realistic risk pool for the public.

That might look like the government requiring freedom of choice in your employer healthcare plan -- eg: the employer has to allow you to port a defined contribution amount to any healthcare plan you prefer, including simply taking the money as salary (disincentivized by taxation though).

It might look like regulating mandatory profit caps on high priced insurance -- meaning if you overpay for your actual risk you get a refund, or maybe free months on the plan etc.

I don't want the government to be the insurance/solution, I want them to set standards that make the game fair and companies can play if they want.

[sarchertech]

I agree we need to do more. I do wonder if just providing a public option to compete against private insurance is the way to go though.

>profit caps

We have profit caps on health insurance. It has many downsides though. The first is that it removes incentives for health insurers to reduce healthcare costs. It actually incentives them to want higher healthcare costs because 15% of a bigger number is more money.

Second, it incentives things like spinning out your insurance division into separate company and then buying an urgent care clinic to run as a sibling company to the insurance company.

Then when the insurance company spends their required 85% on healthcare costs, they just make sure a big chunk of that is spent on services from the sibling provider company.

United Healthcare does exactly this.

Of course functional regulators could stop this, but it’s hard and they don’t. Which is why I think offering a public instead of some of these direct regulations of private companies might work better.