Friday, November 06, 2009
Jacob M. Appel does not mince words when describing his feelings about private health insurance. For the bioethicist and medical historian, the system is nothing short of a criminal enterprise that should be put out of business. Leaving sick people in the hands of private insurers “is about as prudent as hiring a band of pedophiles to run a national childcare program.” It is “a large-scale criminal endeavor—part Ponzi scheme, part extortion racket—that consistently exploits patients at their most vulnerable moments,” like loan sharks.
As Appel sees it, health insurance is a “misnomer.” He explains that the principle behind traditional insurance is the pooling of risk. For example, when people buy fire insurance, their payments are theoretically put into a reserve fund that is used to reimburse the few who have the misfortune to suffer fire damage. Health insurance does not work this way “because, over the course of time, nearly all of us will suffer the bodily ills that cause us to draw funds from the collective till.” For this reason, private health insurers act more like money managers in that they hold and invest our healthcare dollars to their own benefit until we need them.
It is only a matter of time before the heads of health insurers are “dragged before Congress to face the same sort of interrogation at which war profiteers were grilled by the Truman Committee in the 1940s and to which the Waxman Hearings subjected Big Tobacco in the 1990s,” writes Appel.
-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky
Health "Insurance": A Criminal Enterprise (by Jacob M. Appel, Huffington Post)
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