Why do people buy health insurance? The most often cited reason is to transfer the risk of illness to a third party by paying a premium. University of Minnesota economist John Nyman has studied this for many years. He argues that people buy health insurance as an income transfer in the event they become sick. People who are ill often lose their income and health insurance pays a benefit that patients would use their income on. A commenter on the NCPA Health Blog a few years ago said he believed that people buy health insurance for the negotiated discounts. That makes a lot of sense.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Why It’s So Hard to Find a Primary Care Physician
Years ago I had a great primary care physician. One day I drove to his office and saw him assisting an elderly man walk to his car. Dr. Ingram could have asked his nurse to assist the patient. He could even have ignored the frail patient’s unsteady gait and let him fend for himself. Yet, Dr. Ingram personally helped his elderly patient make it to his car. That impressed me immensely. Not only did he treat the man’s health complaint, he made sure his patient got safely out of the office and on his way home. Nobody paid him for that, he did it out of his desire to help people.
Bogus Study on Doctors Prescribing Healthy Foods
Can physicians really urge you, cajole you or nudge you to eat a healthier diet? That is the premise of a new study published in the journal, Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. Eight weeks ago I blogged about whether doctors should counsel their patients on what they eat. My opinion is that nutrition counseling is a good idea,…
How Much Charity Care Should Nonprofit Hospitals Provide?
I began my career in health care working as an accountant for a nonprofit hospital. One of our senior finance executives did a case study of how much the heath care system saved compared to a for-profit system that had to pay taxes. I don’t recall all the details, but it was in the neighborhood of $100 million dollars in 1990. About that same time the accounting managers were told we could no longer write off bad debts to charity care. Charity care had to be granted to deserving patients; we weren’t allowed to decide after not getting paid that care must have been charity.