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Soap Box Interlude
So I have health insurance but little faith in the insurance business. I understand that it is in each company's interest to keep me as worried as possible about my health, so I'll always be insured (and really God forbid anything bad happen if one is not a card carrying member of some HMO or other), while also wanting me to be as healthy as possible so I won't file any claims, thus making my premiums all profit.
Two remarkably ugly articles about the insurance business in the United States have appeared in the last week or so. Malcolm Gladwell had one in the New Yorker's August 29 edition called "The Moral Hazard Myth." What it says is incredibly infuriating, yet hardly surprising, a combination of qualities that is really all too familiar, given the way businesses and the government tend to conduct themselves.
Gladwell's piece makes a bid for national health insurance and in so doing he makes some interesting points about why our current insurance mess exists. It is a matter, he says, of pervasive economic theory as much as it is one of politics and corporations. The idea is that if health care were free (or even affordable), then people would take wild advantage of the benefits the same way that people in an office will drink more soda if free cans of the stuff are sitting around waiting to be gulped down. Applying this kind of thinking to something like health care is so strange that it seems, well, stupid. This thinking has been completely absorbed by the minds of policymakers, though, so it may be an eternity before the idea that everyone needs health insurance, not just so-called "affordable" health insurance catches on. The article will make you angry.
An unpleasant corollary can be found in "Pricey Therapy," a piece Whitney Morrill wrote for Slate about her experiences with trying to sign up with a new insurance company after she had gone to a single session with a psychiatrist to discuss the possibility that she might have post-partum depression. Her odyssey of wildly inflated premiums and appeals is truly miserable, and her conclusion is not triumphant.
From my third trimester on, I was constantly given information about post-partum depression. When I left the hospital, I had all kinds of pamphlets about signs of depression, exhorting me to seek help if I should see them. When Felix's birth certificate arrived, I was amused to see that it came with more pamphlets about the signs of post-partum depression and cautions not to shake the baby. The news has been so full of stories about PPD, celebrity opinions about PPD, testimonials about it, and public service announcements, that it seems like something people should take care of. Insurance companies, apparently, feel otherwise. They see PPD as some kind of horrible liability, not a treatable disease so much as a sign that you are going to be seriously expensive for them and thus, not a good customer. What a crappy bind this puts women in. PPD is horrible, but being afraid to seek treatment or deciding to get help off-the-record by paying cash and such is a luxury not everyone can afford.
I won't paraphrase these pieces further, but I do hope that more people read them and feel outrage and keep the problem of health insurance in mind at election time.
posted by Elise at 12:08 PM
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said...
Sluggo just pointed me to this blog entry after I posted about my desire to take my freelancing business full-time and get private health insurance. Guess I'm screwed, considering I am actually on medication. But thanks for highlighting these articles. Now it won't be a surprise when I get classified Level 4.
--sarachkah
9/01/2005 1:10 PM
Elise said...
I'm sorry to have been the bearer of bad tidings. Are you in an area where the main provider is the one Whitney Morrill talks about? I find her article truly depressing because it really points to a fundamental hopelessness in the health insurance business. One needs it but one shouldn't use it because one might need it someday.
9/02/2005 5:37 AM
said...
Oh yeah. Virginia, baby.
--sarachkah
9/08/2005 7:08 PM
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