Preventative treatment for disease is ten, hundred, thousand times cheaper than treatment ex post facto.
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Sounds like a misguided incentive ...
But even with your point, all insurance companies I've ever had cover with in the UK have had some element of support for preventing illness (periodic assessments, support material and trackers) and, at least with people covered under company schemes, they clearly have an incentive to offer more if you are at risk of becoming affected by a preventable illness.
When we were hiring a lot of people out of college, I spent way more time than I expected teaching them about how healthcare works and how to find their own information. We found that a lot of them would build their idea about how health insurance works from years of reading Reddit posts: They thought visiting the doctor was always going to be a $1000 bill or a single accident was going to medically bankrupt them, because those are the stories they saw on Reddit. I would explain things like the free annual physical and many just wouldn’t believe me. It’s really tough to cut through the confusion out there.
You only get so many chances to be sick before you can't come back from one, or it alters your life so severely you'd wish you were dead anyways.
I'll opt for paying to stay healthy.
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
>Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
>But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
These are items you receive along with your insurance.
They are not insurable events and they are not “covered” like an insurable event.
Predictable, regularly occurring events cannot be covered by insurance by definition. You can’t adjust it, you can’t assemble a risk pool, etc.
We use the word “insurance” to mean “nice things that I like” but I think we’d have more enthusiasm for socialized medicine if we knew how much of “insurance” was nothing of the sort.
Fpr example, paying for a diabetic's insulin/blood sugar testing vs. amputating a limb, with the bonus of a working individual now likely ending up on disability
Even if we're just going to say "diet and exercise" it is a privilege to not live in a food desert and have sidewalks. If we are to mention the free yearly physical it's a privilege to have a doctor nearby and be able to get the time off work
So no, I don't think I am the one missing the point
No one is saying "all medical issues are more expensive if you're poor" or "it's impossible to be healthier if you're poor." All of that is fantastic, but it in no way disproves the catch-22 that it is often more expensive to be poor, in many ways, including medicine. Particularly in the US with its clusterfuck confusopoly of copayments, coinsurance, deductibles, and so on, so the mere act of going to any doctor is a gamble