Monday, September 21, 2015

Matúš Kočalka, Chapter 5, Question 6

The part that I found most interesting was the one with the insurance companies. There were two things that captivated me.                                                                                                                                                             Until now, I didn´t really understand why is the insurance in the USA obligatory to everyone, but this chapter explained it to me. I was also introduced to the paradox of gathering information in economics.                                                                                                                                                                                   Since the price of the insurance is calculated by an average expenses of all of the clients, (and after getting the final price the companies raise it a little bit), it ended up to be unbeneficial to those that are healthy, and very frugal to those that need some medical treatment – which would be covered by the insurance. So the logical conclusion was, that the ones who consider themselves to live healthy lifestyle, weren´t open to pay such a lot of money for the insurance. The companies therefore had to calculate and raise the average price again, and those who considered themselves to be still less sick comparing to the others, didn´t want to pay for the insurance anymore. This would throughout the time lead straight into the damnation of insurance, since no one will be willing to pay for it in the end. The obligatory insurance makes sense – everyone has to pay equal part in order to provide health care to those who need it.                                                                                                                                                                   The other striking part was the one that focused on the reasonable, but immoral practises of insurance companies. The fact that they gather an immense amount of information about your personal life, in order to prevent giving the insurance to people with high probability of getting sick and thus in need of future expensive health treatment paid by the insurance company, is creating serious issue: The ones that really need insurance are usually in trouble of getting it. I understand that the insurance companies don´t want to go into the minuses, so they need to decide to whom is it beneficial to provide the insurance, but doesn´t it miss the overall point? Wasn´t the obligatory insurance established mainly because otherwise the sick wouldn´t be able to get health care?                I thought that the idea of establishing it was that in the sake of humanity everyone will contribute by his part of money and indirectly provide health care to those in need. But at the same time, those in need usually don´t get the insurance. Eh?


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