01-26-2013, 12:22 AM
davester wrote:
Grateful11, Single instances are not really relevant to the discussion. Of course there are some people whose personal experiences will not be in keeping with where they are in a statistical population, but that is the exception, not the rule. Before the incident your friend's daughter's risk of having a condition like that may have been low, but it was not zero.
Ted is advocating that we don't fragment the risk pool as a general philosophy, apparently based on a sense of fairness or avoidance of enmity between groups. I would agree with that if everybody was paying in the same amount and getting the same benefits, but in our current system and the system that will be in place when Obamacare is implemented the risk pool is already fragmented and different people pay different amounts for different levels of care. If we're going to play that game then I say we should throw all the factors that affect costs into the pot to come up with an equation regarding who pays what.
My thought is that almost everyone does something risky. Also, it seems to me if the actuaries did a super good job, we'd all pay about what we cost into the system, which kind of defeats the purpose. Maybe the reward for being healthy should be "being healthy". kj.