Reply #25: People's opinions about their insurers, public or private, are bullshit, unless-- [View All]

--they have been expensively sick. Most people will never be expensively sick, just as most won't have their houses catch fire. Their guesses as to whether their private insurance will actually cover them in the event of serious illness are as worthless as their opinions about how good their local fire department is. If they stay lucky, they'll never know one way or another.

Making an informed decision about anything is flat out impossible without information. The point of health insurance is that 100% of everybody puts money into a pool, which is then used to provide health care. The majority of it will be spent by 20% of the population. The only reason private insurance exists at all is to make sure that they hardly ever issue policies to people in that 20%, thereby diverting money taken from the other 80% from provision of health care to profits. This is not acceptable, period, any more that it is acceptable for your fire department to do a survey of census tracts and refuse to serve those statistically most likely to have fires.

The notion that there can be any such thing as a "market" in health insurance is just plain idiotic.