The Real Problem With the Current Health Care Reform Bill

Insurance companies aren't a necessary part of health care reform. If our governmental leaders were interested in the most efficient and least expensive methods of paying everyone's health care bills, they would pay the health care providers directly.

Here is why;

I first realized this when I was trying to waid through the morass of incomprehensible insurobabble that covers the hundreds of pages in these bills. I thought to myself "is this really a viable solution?". After all, I can remember my law professors constantly admonishing me for not being succinct and concise and yet here, lawyers and congresspeople where churning out a mountainous pile of tedious legal jargon.

To try and bring it all together, I concentrated on the core principles and simplified things a bit.

The plan would use federal money in conjunction with citizens' money to pay insurance companies. These insurance companies would then insure all Americans and pay for their health care costs. The wrinkle is that the insurers will not be able to turn anyone away for pre-existing conditions.

I'm not an insurance expert, but, my limited understanding of the business is that insurance is a form of gamble that determines how much you have to pay, based on how much risk you pose to the company. I.e. if I am a 99 year old smoker who likes to sky dive, my risk to the insurance company is quite high and my premium would be high. If I decide to inject myself with a poison that will definitely kill me in 10 years I will pose a definite risk to the insurance company and they will not likely want to insure me because they know that they will lose the gamble.

Now, if insurance companies are prevented from turning away people who have problems that will definitely require health treatment, it seems to me that insurance stops being insurance. This is because the treatment will be required and there is no gamble. If the insurance co. has to take on sick people then the premiums that those insurance co.s will need to charge to make any money will have to jump drastically.

After all, insurance companies aren't charities, they are out to make money (which is fine). They don't have a magical money exchange that makes your $5,000 annual premium turn into $500,000.00 when you need treatment. They have a group of other customers who they also gamble on. When someone needs treatment, that money comes from the insurance company's profits. If no customer needed treatment the insurance company's would have increased profits. Likewise, if every customer needed care, the company's profits would dry up.

In other words, if you definitely need care an insurance company would lose money if it charged you any less than what it would cost to render the care and cover its overhead.

So, if this happens, then the government and the taxpayer are effectively footing the entire bill for the collective health care. Its not just the government helping to pay your current health care premiums as they stand now, when the insurance companies' risk is relatively low.(Compared to the proposed plan).

When I realized that we are footing the bill one way or the other, it occurred to me that the cost of health care under the proposed reform legilsations could be viewed using this equation:

Total Government Liability = Health Care Cost + Insurance Companies Profit



So if we are ultimately paying the whole thing, why not just cut out the middle man and send payments directly to the doctors?


Then the cost of health care would look like this:

Total Government Liability = Health Care Cost

Chrome Gestures Alternative

Firefox was pissing me off (freezing) and I decided to give Google Chrome another try. Since I hadn't fiddled with Google Chrome since it was in the beta phase, I figured there had been some much needed improvements since my previous encounter.

I was right, Google Chrome has gotten better in the last year, but one thing I sorely missed was the ability to press down a mouse button, flick to the left and "go back" just like in Firefox via "Firegestures".

A quick keyword search yielded a few possible options including "Rocker" designed by "Autohotkey" which allows the most common functions of "back" and "forward" to be accomplished by pressing the mouse buttons in the proper order.

Example: To go backwards, first press and hold the right mouse button while simultaneously tapping the left mouse button. Back you go without even having to move the mouse!

For me this is great as what was little or no work before has just become even less. My wrist will undoubtedly start to fatten up now that it isn't required to do so much laborious flicking.

So theres that issue...but notwithstanding the chubby wrist syndrome, I'm down with this incredibly simple and low impact (resource wise) solution.

[Via Domainrange]

[Original story posted on Lifehacker]