Health Insurance For Cars

One of the Republican opponents of the current insurance reform proposal went on about how health insurance should be like car insurance, claiming that if you bought car insurance that paid for oil changes nobody could afford car insurance. Health insurance, he claimed, should cover only catastrophic illness and people should pay for routine medical expenses out of their ordinary income.

He’s been watching too many reruns of “My Mother the Car.”

If my car loses a wheel and I can’t afford to replace it I have quite a few options; I can get friends to take me places; I can ride buses; I can walk; I can stay home. There are probably some other options I didn’t think of.

Delaying the repair to the car is not going to make it worse. I can easily wait until I save up enough money, and when I do it will still cost the same amount for the repair.

I, however, am not a car. I am a person and I have emphysema.

So let’s say that I have the catastrophic insurance that this Republican thinks is reasonable. I get a cough and I don’t have the $100 that it costs to go to the doctor, so I don’t go because the insurance doesn’t cover that. The next thing that happens is that I have a major lung infection and am in the emergency room, which costs several thousand dollars. The insurance policy pays for that.

So my decision was a sound one economically for me, but it means a lot of discomfort, and it’s probably a false economy due to time lost from work.

But was it sound for the insurance company, and was it sound for society? I’m not an insurance underwriter or executive, but I’m pretty sure the insurance company would have been happy to pay that $100 in order to prevent the emergency room visit.

It’s a really bad decision for everybody if, as is quite possible in my case, I get pneumonia and die from it despite a week in intensive care at a cost of many thousands of dollars.

All because of an uninsured $100 doctor’s office visit that I couldn’t afford.