Healthcare insurance can ironically bring on Premature Demise and Early Sickness. Firstly, insurance is the business of guaranteeing against IMPROBABLE (low incidence) high costs catastrophe, so that insurance company can pocket as much of the premiums as possible and the clients (policy holders) can sleep well at night. But today, the original concept of health care / any insurance has become CORRUPTED BEYOND RECOGNITION. People NEGLECT their own health thinking that healthcare insurance would solve any and every health related problem without pain/ costs and even ignore personal warning signs of ill health till illness is at a terminal stage because they have faith in insurers to pick the tab (and in modern-day medicine to reverse all disease) which are both very false assumptions because this only results in stratospheric claims payouts by insurers since owning a health insurance policy has now instead INDUCED people to NEGLECT their own health resulting in need to treat late stage diseases at much higher treatment costs. Private hospitals are also experts at maxing out healthcare insurance benifits and charge for everything from call button activations to cotton-wool swabs used. To avoid going bankrupt/ maintain generous profit margins in the light of the high claims payouts experienced, insurance companies then have to raise premiums for remaining participants to the maximum humanly possible which places the remaining participants (who never maintained personal health) between rock and a hard place. These participants, having invested a large proportion of their income on healthcare insurance premiums at the expense of decent food, disciplined exercise and adequate rest, now have diabetes and other severe chronic disease that would make them un-insurable should they seek alternative insurance at an advanced state of disease/age, yet have to contend with the stratospheric healthcare insurance premiums that are killing them from the inside and causing them excessive stress and ill health that would soon kill them if the insurance premiums don't. They are held ransom by both the threat illness due to chronic disease accumulation as well as stratospheric insurance premiums which they can ill afford: every day is a train wreck in slow motion in an accelerated downwards spiral. In short, modern day healthcare insurance has become a dangerous and addictive drug that gives false SHORT term reassurance but long term COSTS due to being poorly conceptualized and indiscriminately sold/mis-applied. Healthcare insurance can NEVER be an effective substitute for a disciplined and proper healthy lifestyle and can adversely cause early demise and ill health if it is indiscriminately applied in a way that places the cart before the horse.
Interesting thought. Different from the common occurrence of overuse of the healthcare system for unnecessary treatments or medications. Bariatric surgery is now a common remedy for morbid obesity which unfortunately is mostly unresponsive to conservative treatment.
Singapore is beginning to experience the same problem as USA when insurance becomes a complete additional service provider in itself, worsening the problem it is to solve to increase its OWN importance and cream profits in the midst. Insurance historically has been for the purpose of helping members in a pool of RESPONSIBLE people to sleep at night. Shipping merchants were known to incur heavy debt /loss (entire ship, cargo and all lives of sailors on board lost etc) due to inclement weather / ship wreck due to unpredictable weather patterns at sea which no sailor is immune to despite the best experience and efforts against. Old European law also provided for inability to service debt to be a criminal offence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison so the risk of ship owners being jailed consequent to their ship going under was immediate and real. So ship owners started the savings pool amongst themselves so that they could all sleep better at night without excessive worry about languishing in jail should their ships go under. Only experienced, trustworthy ship owners familiar with each other were welcomed and rival/ untrustworthy ship owners were not welcomed at all. At inception, insurance was always a logical group response to the unpreventable, unpredictable and unfathomable. It was NEVER a substitute for common sense and personal responsibility nor a guarantee against death / ill health due to bad lifestyle choices. Only the most risky and most un-preventable and unavoidable losses would be covered and perhaps not to 100% to keep the premiums affordable and to save participant members from inevitable jail time for unpaid debt due to ship wreck. Everyday health is the responsibility of the individual citizen. Whilst it is the responsibility of the government to provide public needs in the general ingredients of good health such as clean air, clean drinking water, good basic education (common sense), safe parks and recreation areas for public rest and exercise, bicycle transport, general sanitation and garbage disposal services to reduce the spread of disease from garbage accumulation and unprocessed sewerage and the funding of universities into the lifestyle factors essential to good health and freely available to anyone with basic education and willing to learn. As for those who refuse to utilize the public provided general facilities and research study results towards good health, refuse to change their unhealthy lifestyle habits like sedentary life, smoking, drug and alcohol abuse: their ill health ought to be their own problem to handle and they may seek help from charity and other civil society sponsorship groups for charity aid. The government ought to focus on population healthy lifestyle empowerment and the treatment of unavoidable genetic congenital disease and malformations in public universities in order to increase the medical knowledge repository and to provide everyone a fair chance at life.
Updated copy of my reply is available at http://sgtalk.org/mybb/Thread-Healt...and-Premature-Sickness?pid=2543330#pid2543330
How is your health care system set up? What proportion of costs are borne by the patient who is hospitalised?
Singapore healthcare system is something between USA and UK (/NHS) I guess, hope the following answers : https://www.moh.gov.sg/content/moh_web/home/costs_and_financing/schemes_subsidies.html
Guess the only truth is the payer is always (/90%) out to confuse, otherwise the payer will go bust. Hospitalization insurance will never pray aloud that the patient quickly dies / is cured and thus discharged from hospital although they do so in silence since that ends their misery of having to pay for his treatment, likewise the gahmen who writes schemes that impress the majority of voters and seldom lasts the test of time since many voters are shallow and unless better advised, have the tendency to seek immediate gratification.
Lately a lot of people we know going in for minor day surgeries they can afford only because of insurance are dying from the surgery. Medical accidents are now the #2 cause of death in the USA. Hundreds of thousands. Go in for a simple hernia operation and end up with your organs failing, in a coma and on a respirator. Another person we know that happened to from dental surgery. Another person's father was declared "brain dead" twice, but when pulling the plug refused he revived both times. There is a growing joke around here that if you want to commit suicide, go the ER foor some elective surgery. Insurance also is likely why have the people in the country take a hand full of prescription drugs a day despite all the warnings about them. It is becoming if a person can avoid surgery they are playing Russian roulette if they have it done.
I feel so SAD that both insurance and the medical profession, once noble, are now fighting over scraps. In the beginning, both insurer strived to promote health, but i dunno which party started the DOWNWARDS SPIRAL to now promote ILLNESS. Ironically now both insurer and hospital want the person more sick/ dead ASAP, but each for separate reasons. The insurer wants the person whose payouts exceed premium payments paid/ doesn't seem to be getting better- dead ASAP so all medical treatments can CEASE IMMEDIATELY to protect profit margins of the insurance trade. The doctors get paid for services rendered, so the sicker the patient gets, the more compensation for work done they can invoice the insurance company for. The most profitable patients are those on terminal life support who use every device and procedure under the sun and basically become the guinea pig- piggy bank for all hospital staff without being able to complain too much. It is too complicated to pay/ rank numerous private hospitals and clinics based upon performance, so hospitals get to become the leeches/parasites of the insurance business, just as long as the Dr CEOs and practitioners know the loopholes to get patients sicker without ever being caught.
