Insurance - Medical versus Automotive

Brings to mind Inigo Montoya's line from The Princess Bride:

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Swiped in full from Maggie's Farm:

The "Change"
The change in medical care. I refuse to term it "health care," since health needs no care other than one's own reasonably-sensible and attentive but not health-obsessed life, combined with the main factor - luck. From a commenter at Allahpundit:

Perhaps the concept of "insurance" isn't the right one for health care?

I always liked the comparison that was trying to be made with car insurance

Yet for there to be an equivalent your car insurance would have to cover:
- maintenance tune-ups, including oil and filter changes
- the cost of repairs for any reason
- a price break per gallon of gas
- an annual detailing
- the cost of tires
- a new muffler annually
- and never, ever raising the cost of your insurance no matter how many accidents you were in, how many tickets you got - anything

Imagine what car insurance would be like if we modeled that on health insurance coverage and you get an idea why health insurance coverage is so high. And why get fuel efficient vehicles if you are getting the gas subsidized? Or bother with the maintenance if you'll get a brand new engine if you forgot about it? And the cost of such insurance would be lower than what you have now?

The number of shades of maroon that went into trying to make this entire "insurance" concept work for one's health is plain nuts. It isn't "insurance" if you are going to use it constantly -  you want something else.

Perhaps a clue.

Health insurance used to be an executive "perk" because it was TOO EXPENSIVE to provide for everyone in the workforce. Businesses got a price break for it to entice people who would not normally come to work to do so during WWII. The war ended. The subsidy via the tax code did not. Strangely enough before this misbegotten idea got infested into the tax code and people�s minds, individuals did not drop over dead in the street and did work out payment schedules WITH hospitals and physicians. Amazingly that worked and there was a strong system of charitable hospitals and care givers to pick up the slack. Then government got involved and screwed it up.

Government is all about money. Government's expertise is perverse incentives. The Obama-thing, like the previous Hillary-thing, is not technically insurance. It's just pre-paid medical costs, spread across populations and subsidized, or not, by income and with bureaucrats deciding what you can get paid on it.

That's not an entirely insane idea, except that whenever government gets involved with things outside their Constitutional mandate, things turn out wrong and over-controlling by the standards of a free country. Always.

I do not believe that most Americans want every detail of their lives politicized. I think they want to be left alone, but maybe I am old-fashioned.

The whole thing is being mis-framed by the progressives in order to sell it to the rest of us. They want it to collapse (which it is doing nicely) and they will then try to transform it into a single-payer model. The practice of Medicine will take a 70% reduction in quality and availability if that happens. Speaking of Obamacare collapsing, I love these two numbers: From the Australian Broadcasting Company - Tue 10 Sep 2013:

Offer of one-way trip to live on Mars has volunteers lining up
More than 200,000 people from 140 countries have applied to go to Mars and never return, the group behind an ambitious venture to colonise the inhospitable red planet says.

More:

One in four of the 202,586 applicants for the one-way trip are Americans, says Mars One, a non-profit group which initiated the hunt for "would-be Mars settlers" in April.

And this one from Forbes:

How Many People Have Enrolled In Obamacare? An Early Look

This excerpt

As a result, the number of enrollees through the 36 federal exchanges is likely very low. Industry analyst Bob Laszewski surveyed health plans last week and reported back with pessimistic news: "Not more than about 5,000 individuals and families signed up for health insurance" through healthcare.gov as of last Monday, he concluded.

"In the federal exchanges, the big market share guys were only getting about 20 [contracts] a day on October 7," Laszewski told me, although he noted that each contract could potentially cover several lives. "They are telling me the rate is holding at about that level as recently as [Friday]," he added.

It's tough to argue with Laszewski's estimate; federal officials have refused to release healthcare.gov enrollment data until mid-November.

Taking a one-way trip to Mars with an unknown space expedition is significantly more popular than enrolling in a medical program run by the masterminds in Washington, D.C.