I think what you all are talking about here is "illness insurance?" Just because someone rebranded it healthcare insurance doesn't make it so. Just like when the dept of war was rebranded dept of defense. It is a fabrication. We have a medical community that thrives on illness, not health.
No. That is a doubleplus ungood comment. No one calls it illness insurance. Just like no one ever says death insurance, car crash insurance, or someone stole all the stuff from my apartment insurance.
The point is that we have an entire system geared towards illness and virtually no system geared towards "health." The doctors are not paid to keep you healthy --- they get paid when your sick. The incentives and rewards are all completely backwards in the US.
A huge percentage of so called healthcare dollars are spent on the last 90 days of a person's life. Most of this is for very elderly people who are going to die soon. And guess what, there are no studies or tracking to even assure that end of life care extends a person's life. In any other business we would call that "milking the system."
Here is an excerpt from a good piece --
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/10/19/health-care-why-america-overspends/According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States spends more money on health care per capita than any other nation on Earth -- nearly $7,300 per citizen in 2007 (the latest for which firm figures are available), of which nearly half was financed by tax dollars through programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. That's 87 percent more than Canada paid to give its citizens universal health care that year, and more than three times the expenditures in the United Kingdom.
And it gets worse. With an estimated $2.8 trillion expected to be spent on health care in the U.S. this year, we're on track to spend $8,920 per capita in 2013, a figure that could pass $14,000 per capita if health care spending rises to the expected $4.5 trillion in 2019.
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The medical and pharmaceutical industries have figured out how to game the system. "Well, we're getting paid 100s of billions of dollars and the population keeps getting sicker. Guess we need some more money, Doctors, nurses and pharmaceuticals"
Mustachians will need to be very proactive in their personal "health" care. Eat plenty of veggies, get some good exercise, stay fit and trim. Some illnesses are unavoidable but the big ones, obesity, heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes, alcoholism, etc are behaviorally based.
My wild ass guestimate is that 80% of health dollars are not spent in a Mustachian effective manner. This would make sense as 80% of the US population pisses away their money as a matter of habit with little thought about the outcomes. A case of the patients running the asylum.
Whew! Glad I got that off my chest!