= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
mwengler comments on Politics Discussion Thread August 2012 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (166)
I think part of the problem here is that we do not, in fact, have health insurance in the US, but rather have healthcare plans.
Health insurance would be an insurance policy on your health - if your health declines, they pay out based on that. So if you come down with tuberculosis while on their policy, they pay you for the expenses of that (or possibly just pay out the average cost of tuberculosis treatment), even if you immediately drop your insurance after coming down with it.
What we have are healthcare plans we -call- insurance. And I agree that the incentives are screwed up with healthcare plans, but disagree that government is necessarily the solution. I'd prefer genuine health insurance, which would have much better incentives.
I have auto insurance. My car is worth much less now than when I originally insured it, 7 years ago. My auto insurance does not cover that change.
I have home insurance. The value of my home declined by many 100s of thousands of dollars in 2008. My home insurance did not cover that change.
Isn't there some relevant Eliezer sequence I should be citing on how defining things to mean things different from what they mean to virtually everyone else who might be in the discussion is suboptimal?
Well here is an Eliezer post arguing that using misleading labels is suboptimal even if everyone else is using them.
I meant what I wrote, exactly how I wrote it.
Car insurance doesn't cover the monetary value of your car; home insurance doesn't cover the monetary value of your home. If they did, they'd have covered those things. They cover the thing itself in both cases, provided you have full coverage auto insurance or live in a no-fault state. (If you have liability insurance, of course, something else entirely is being insured.)
You could be leading into something about old age, but unless there's a specific health concern related to old age that you don't think should be covered, I don't think there will be anything to discuss. If I had health insurance and my heart started to go out and they declared that the value of my heart has depreciated so it's not worth the cost of replacement... well, then they haven't insured anything at all. I think I'd have some strong words for my insurance agent.
Insurance isn't there to protect the value of your home, it's there to -replace- your home if it gets destroyed. Which means if your house got destroyed in 2008, odds are (although it varies by insurance policy and possibly jurisdiction), you'd get less from your insurance company than if it had been destroyed in 2007.
Similarly, insurance isn't there to protect the value of my health, but to provide me the ability to restore it in the event that it gets damaged.