March 3, 2009
Scattershot Department
Health Status, Yoo, TP, Legal Costs, and a White Wedding
Random shots around the web:
- I've often thought the best way to provide health insurance for pre-existing conditions would be to have the lifetime cost of the condition paid by whatever insurance company you had when you were first diagnosed. Ronald Bailey explores a hybrid variation of this called health status insurance that seems to provide portability, choice, and pretty-good market incentives.
- I think a key component of any plan to preserve American civilization is ensuring that former DOJ Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo is never allowed to work in government again.
- Here's an interesting collection of advice on how to understand and reduce attorney fees.
- You can have mine when you pry if from my hot, stinky...
- Sometimes the music video is a literal interpretation of the song, sometimes it's based on a similar conceptual them, and sometimes it intentionally undermines the song, But what if the song was a literal interpretation of the video? I've seen this done with subtitles on foreign performances, but here's a complete re-singing of Billy Idol's White Wedding.
(Hat tip, Radley)
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"'ve often thought the best way to provide health insurance for pre-existing conditions would be to have the lifetime cost of the condition paid by whatever insurance company you had when you were first diagnosed."
An interesting proposal that has never occurred to me. In a way, it would be like auto insurance or malpractice insurance. Even when the policies are discontinued, claims for events that occurred while the policy was in force are covered until up until the statute of limitations negates the possibility of a legal claim.
Yeah, that's kind of the idea.
There would be a lot of complications. You'd need some way to simplify the administration, so you don't have to submit claims to every company that ever insured you. Perhaps you'd just submit to your current company and they'd submit subordinate claims to past companies or something. The point would be to let the insurance companies fight over it without involving the patient.
You'd need a robust reinsurance market, to allow companies to lay off risks they don't know how to manage. For example, some companies may specialize in long-term diseases like multiple sclerosis or cystic fibrosis. Conceivably, such companies might have an incentive to develop new drugs and treatments in order to reduce their long-term costs.
You'd also need some insurer of last resort, probably the federal government, to handle what happens when an insurance company goes out of business. Probably this should be some sort of FDIC-style proceeding, where other companies bid how much they want to pick up a patient's coverage, with the government making up the difference between the failed company's assets and the total bid package.