The average health insurance premium costs 84% of average unemployment benefits

So if you lose your job and get unemployment benefits and still want to have some sort of health insurance, 84% of your benefits will go toward having health insurance.

We’re subsidizing a horribly inefficient and criminally perversely incented system that rewards doctors and hospitals for doing more office visits, more tests, and more procedures.

It’s sinking our country, but the revenues are continuing to stream in to the health insurance companies. They invest more in trying to improve their profits. They ruin the doctor profession (we have to see more and more of you to maintain our current decreasing salary). And they’re ruining everyone’s economic well-being, except for themselves. Because they’ve convinced us that health insurance is pre-paid health care, rather than true insurance – protection from catastrophic loss.

I’ll say it again:

“If we thought of health insurance like we think of home insurance, we’d be going through our home insurance companies to buy new lightbulbs or paint to paint our walls. Health insurance needs to be fundamentally changed so that it stops being pre-payment for health care. We need to start thinking of health insurance as true insurance, not pre-payment and management of your health.”

Can you imagine the expense of purchasing groceries if we all had to hire someone to purchase our groceries for us and perform thousands of dollars of tests on us every month to determine the right kind of food we eat?

Why not just go down the street to the market and buy your food from supermarkets competing on price and quality?

Food is a right. Health care is a right. Health management that costs two to three times as much as it should is criminal.

The average health insurance premium costs 84% of average unemployment benefits