- Many millions of Americans rarely use medical facilities or doctors.
They should be rewarded for their considerate attitude regarding that
limited resource. A method might be able to do just that, and far more.
- But EVERY person pays in large Premiums for Health Insurance
coverage. Few people seem to have thought through WHERE their
Insurance Premium money goes to! It primarily goes to two purposes.
One is to supply the $80 million dollar per year Salary of a lot of
the Executives of the giant Insurance Companies. Personally, if
I thought they were hands-on people who were actually DOING SOMETHING
on a daily basis, maybe they could be seen as deserving such obscene
Salaries, but the reality seems to be that they only actually make
one or two major decisions PER YEAR (where they have subordinates
do all the actual work). When such giant Corporations claim to be
Non-Profit organizations, I have even less tolerance for the
Executives receiving such enormous Annual Salaries. ONE million
dollars per year? I guess I could swallow that, although even then
I have some doubts whether they actually EARNED even that!
The other place where YOUR insurance Premium payments go is to
a very small number of patients which use up millions of dollars
in exotic treatment. It is well documented that patients in the
last six months of life often are the focus of many millions of
dollars AUTOMATICALLY spent, to allegedly extend their mortal
life. Such patients are commonly in comas or under such extreme
pain medication that they seem to not really be aware of their
environment anyway. Shouldn't someone have ASKED the patient whether
(someone else, including YOU) should have to spend millions for
such apparently minimal accomplishment? Of course, the fact that
it is NOT THEIR MONEY, I suppose they would want billions spent
on themselves! But what I am trying to point out here is that
thousands of generally healthy people constantly make Insurance
Premium payments which effectively is like flushing the money
down a toilet, as it will never be used FOR THEM. A single
person who has advanced AIDS can consume the Premiums of many
thousands of OTHER Premium payers. An interesting detail is that
it is relatively rare that the person with the AIDS has rarely
paid in much or any Insurance Premiums anyway!
- Imagine a PRIVATE, MEMBERS ONLY group of exactly 10,000 American
families. The participants would have to QUALIFY in two distinct
ways for possible membership in a specific group. Their entire family
expenditures for medical situations, including insurance, for the previous
five years must be examined and confirmed as accurate.
- The Premium rate that each Member would pay would then be based on
the total of the entire group per year.
- There would be NO millions of dollars going to a bunch of
Executives. And, with reasonable selectivity regarding accepting
the member families, relatively few might have lifestyles which
might involve AIDS or other behavior patterns of certain portions
of human society. You might see that such a SELECTIVE and
SIMILAR group of Members might have minimal Medical expenses. Since
THEIR Insurance Premiums would be EXCLUSIVELY calculated by the
running balance of THEIR Insurance Account, once they have collectively
built up an adequate amount, THEIR Insurance Premiums might drop
to near zero.
- This situation is exactly what National Medical Insurance
programs are fearful of. They NEED and EXPECT thousands of healthy
people to be sending in payments, in order to have the money to
pay for the extreme expenses of a small number of patients.
- The suggestion here is simply to enable thousands of SEPARATE
groups each effectively have their own tiny Insurance Company.
In general, many such groups of generally healthy people should
NEVER need any government money at all! Their own Premiums into
their own Account would generally be sufficient to cover all of the
medical expenses of all of the members of all of their families!
It should therefore be rare that their Account would need any help
at all from the Federal Government regarding covering all of their
Medical costs.
- The government would endow a Fund for this group with an initial
one million, and the Premiums of the Members would therefore maintain
the balance in that Fund at the desired amount.
- The government would also provide a $400 income tax reduction
for every family that was a Member of any such group.
- For the minimal health care families discussed above, their
ANNUAL Premiums might be less than that $400, so by minimal usage
of the Health Care system, they would actually MAKE MONEY in the process,
along with having the coverage they desire for their families.
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Carl W. Johnson, Theoretical Physicist, Physics Degree from Univ of Chicago