Health Insurance: How We Can Make It Better

You almost have to take out a loan to pay for health insurance these days. Even if your company pays for half or more of your premium, a premium for a family still runs at least two to three hundred dollars a month. This is ridiculous, especially for people that do not visit the doctor very often. However, everyone is worried that if they do not have health insurance, then they will need it and they will not be able to get the help that they need, or they will get substandard healthcare because they do not have insurance. Many factors have surfaced over the years that cause health insurance to continue to stay on the rise.

One of the major problems that cause health insurance to continue to rise is the amount of frivolous malpractice lawsuits that are filed against doctors every year. Even if a doctor does not do anything wrong, they still have to pay the court costs, which usually are paid for out of their malpractice insurance. And if a doctor does make a mistake they can pay ten’s of millions of dollars in damages. All of this causes doctor’s to pay more for malpractice insurance, which translates into higher costs to their patient’s so they can continue to survive. One of the best ideas I have heard to help combat this problem, is legislature that puts a cap on monetary awards that are awarded for punitive damages in these lawsuits. Anything over the cap will be given to the state to help pay for schools, roads, and other things for the community. This will slow people down who want to sue just to get rich quick, but will still allow people to sue if a wrong has truly been committed.

Another major problem that causes health insurance problems is the ability of health insurance companies to get out of paying the full amount requested by a doctor. Health insurance companies rarely pay half of what a doctor’s office requests, so the doctor’s office usually has to eat the lost costs. This causes doctor’s offices to raise their prices to help shoulder the burden of these lost profits. An easy solution would be to implement some kind of regulations that would allow doctor’s offices to collect the full amount for a visit. These regulations would force health insurance companies to pay the amount that doctor’s charge, thus lowering the prices of doctor’s visits for all of their patients.