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In the US, why doesn't a personal savings account make more sense than health insurance? (piefed.social)

submitted 19 hours ago by CptHacke@piefed.social to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

57 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hear me out on this, please.

Let's say that I spend $5k on health insurance in a year, but don't go to the doctor or have any medical issues in that year. Where does my money go? It disappears. I basically just gave away my money, and received nothing in return. However, if I took that $5k and simply put it into a personal savings account instead of giving it away to a health insurance provider - that money stays right there if and whenever I decide to use it. It even collects interest.

I realize that with a health insurance provider, you're (supposedly) getting discounted rates on medical services - but if your money is just disappearing into thin air if you don't happen to need those medical services in a given year, are you really saving money? It just seems like a really big scam to me - what am I missing?

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[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 50 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Let try this, why don't we pool our money into a big savings account of pretax dollars for everyone in the entire country and add a supervising org that works with hospital networks to keep cost low through collective bargaining. At some point we the hospital networks become a single national network.

[–] Asafum@lemmy.world 30 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Ok so I hear you, but where do I get to deny claims and make $638,384,274,836.67 for myself while you die of a completely treatable disease? It's not a fair system to me so I'm going to ~~bribe~~ lobby Congress and get my way.

[–] towerful@programming.dev 9 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

The fix is clearly to have a group of non-medical people in charge of that pooled pot of money who can deny payments for arbitrary reasons.
I think this is the most sane solution

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Most sane seems a bit of a stretch, but I will grant you that given the current system sane-er definitely works.

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 8 points 16 hours ago

Lol well we have video from last year that showed what we should do with you in that case.