Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

To be fair, a lot of stuff work that way. Take an HVAC maintenance plan for example. For some fee (based on the model and age of your HVAC and the condition it's in), you get routine maintenance covered. They do what they can to prevent major hiccups, but if it breaks down, they'll repair it (after trying to weasel their way out of it).

It's pretty darn common across a lot of industries.




Warranties are different because though they also depend on non-utilization, the defects they cover are generally likely to occur at some point (the guarantor is just hoping it will be after your warranty expires), and consequently higher utilization rates are expected.

Insurance is based on the assumption that only an extremely small number of insured persons will ever make [significant] claims against the policy; insurance is for expensive potentialities that are very unlikely. The entire industry and regulatory framework is structured around that assumption because that is what the word "insurance" means in all contexts outside of health care.

The problem is that pretty much everyone is going to need significant medical care at some point in their life, certainly as they age into their senior years if not earlier.

Would you buy a "health maintenance plan" under the stipulations of health insurance policies, which are basically "Pay us a lot of money, and we'll make some farcically big numbers look smaller for you, but you'll still probably owe a lot of money; we won't know how much until you already owe it"? Of course not.

The racket we call the American health system can only exist by masquerading as "insurance".


There's a pretty important difference between humans and HVACs, which is the reason the two systems end up being very different.

You can always rip out the HVAC and put in a new, off the shelf unit with roughly the same specs (often better, because progress) at a fixed, known cost, and the customer will even often be happier if they end up doing that instead of repairs. If health care providers could trivially decide to euthanize and replace patients with expensive diseases, health care insurance would be as trivial as HVAC maintenance plans.


What you say is totally true, but completely irrelevant to the point I was making.

All i was saying is that it's pretty common/normal/etc for insurance (in any industry. Literal insurance or things that are insurance in practice but not literally) to offer routine exam/tests/maintenance/checks if it can prevent the worse case scenario $$$ from happening.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: