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An assumption that must be
made by those who espouse a health care system based on free markets
is that patients have the free and open opportunity to choose their
own health insurance. This freedom would have to include both the
freedom to purchase an affordable health plan of their choice, and
the freedom to exit from a health plan when dissatisfied. Obviously,
if these conditions were not met, than the whole notion of free
markets would be false from the word go, and the highly-touted efficiencies
of the healthcare marketplace would simply not apply.
Of course, in real life relatively
few individuals have any substantial say-so over their health insurance.
The unemployed or the self-employed have extremely limited choices, since
most insurers seem to have taken pains to price them out of the
market. While many employees can choose among two or maybe three
options from a "menu" of health plans, even that amount of
choice
hardly constitutes a free and open market. And the notion that
employees have any real opportunity to exit from a plan they don't
like is simply a joke.
So the idea that the average patient's
biggest problem is how to choose the right health insurance (out of
all their many choices) is largely a fantasy. A more realistic
problem is how they ought best deal with the insurance they do have (if they're fortunate enough
to have health insurance in the first place) when it's time to get
medical services.
As part of our mission to help you
understand and survive the American health care system, YourDoctorintheFamily.com
addresses
several aspects of health insurance. We show you how we as a society
arrived
at our current sad state of affairs regarding health insurance - and
regarding many other facets of health care - in Health
Care 2000 - How it got this way.
We
demonstrate the relationship between health insurance and managed
care (a relationship more tenuous than you may think) in The Secrets of Managed Care.
In Portrait of a Modern HMO
we tell the sobering story of one HMO whose methods apply, unfortunately, to most health plans in existence today.
And we
offer you some advice on surviving modern insurance plans in:
Don't thank us. It's what we do.
We're your
on-line guide to understanding and
surviving the American health care system.
YourDoctorintheFamily.com
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