> that's guaranteed to eventually happen is you're going to get sick in a very expensive manner.
Wrong, there's still a large part of the population who will end up dying of what we call "natural causes" such as Heart attacks and stuff like that. These are very inexpensive, because you don't see them coming, usually. So, no, not everyone on Earth dies from Cancer.
That's why I qualified it with "if you're lucky to live long enough".
So, yeah, you might be lucky enough to unexpectedly drop dead before some other scourge takes you
However if you don't happen to fortune into a sudden unexpected death, your body will inevitably decay to the point that you will become a large financial and emotional burden on someone. (Or die homeless and friendless). But we can't take care of those people, cuz socialism! They should have had the common courtesy to just hurry up and die.
If the probabilities were as bad as you suggest, there would be no such thing as health insurance. They need to bring in more than they spend on health-care costs. Most people can't end in a devastating health-cost manner.
So.. your argument is that because insurance companies can profit, it's not so bad? "Well, your legacy might be financial ruin for your children, or an early death to avoid that, but since most people die before they realize they're severely ill, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm not arguing probabilities here, I'm arguing deductive reasoning. You are a decaying meatsack. So am I. At some point something very bad will happen to that decaying meatsack. Such an event will be absurdly expensive to treat. Since I think we'd all agree that for pretty much anyone it makes sense to have health insurance, the obvious next step is: just give everyone health insurance and take it out of tax, and simplify these things 1000 fold. (Not to mention that a single payer would have WAY more leverage, and thusly could negotiate way lower prices. And that's not a hypothetical.. that's how it works in pretty much every country that isn't the US).
>So.. your argument is that because insurance companies can profit, it's not so bad?
His/her argument is, AFAICT: "Because insurance companies can profit, that shows that less than a majority of people die after a prolonged, expensive illness.
Therefore the earlier statement that "it is 100% certain you will have a long, expensive illness at some point in life" is not true.
Plenty of people die of sudden stroke or heart attack in their 70s after a relatively healthy life up to that point.
But the problem is also that healthcare in the US is just absurdly expensive, insurance or not. Sure, many EU countries have universal health insurance, but if you look behind those, costs (paid by the insurance or not) are quite a bit lower than the US. They're still quite hefty and you do want to be insured for them, but why is healthcare in the US so expensive in the first place?
1/3rd of US healthcare costs is administrative. Single payer (Medicare for all) fixes that.
The lowest hanging fruit, biggest bang for the buck, best ROI, the most logical common sense way to control US healthcare costs is to switch to single payer with universal coverage.
Sure, do all the other kabuki, like quality of care, healthcare insurance exchanges, price transparency, generics, whatever. Because better is better. But know that you're weeding the flower beds while the house is burning down.
I think the real problem that affects everyone in US is the cost of anything health related before insurance. This may be a consequence of the fact that everything is private, but just look at the numbers.
You may be thinking "OK, the system is not great but I'm fine because I've got a good insurance", but that's not true. Even with a good insurance you're getting ripped off before of the cost before insurance of healthcare.
Not really. Hugely ruinous medical expenses could be something that happened, say, once every hundred or two hundred person-years and still affect a massive proportion of people who lived long enough. Also, even just health insurance for critical illness and emergencies isn't exactly cheap...
Well it's not like the health insurance companies really want to pay for the bills the contracts are always phrased in such a way that the can just say... well we don't cover that when you get sick but the do expect you to pay every month when you are healthy.
They wouldn't have that ability in a European like country sponsored insurance since everything would be covered.
> Wrong, there's still a large part of the population who will end up dying of what we call "natural causes" such as Heart attacks and stuff like that. These are very inexpensive
Wrong, there's still a large part of the population who will end up dying of what we call "natural causes" such as Heart attacks and stuff like that. These are very inexpensive, because you don't see them coming, usually. So, no, not everyone on Earth dies from Cancer.