>On malpractice insurance, a lot of the motivation to sue is to
>ensure there's money to pay the health care costs of whatever got
>messed up in the malpractice. Without the fear of being swamped
>with medical costs, a lot of these lawsuits would go away, and the
>ones that didn't wouldn't have a medical care award component cause
>everyone's covered.
And if there was a guaranteed adequate income, then compensation for lost income would become redundant too. At the moment, compensation litigation is the only way people who suffer from some catastrophic medical or accident event can hope to get access to the means of living any kind of decent life. They have to find someone to blame, someone to blame who has deep pockets. Or someone with insurance.
Courts more and more tend to be sympathetic to the victim of such injury, more than willing to find someone liable. Because the alternative is to leave the victim with no way to live a decent life in a society where money is essential for that. Courts are run by humans. So its inevitable that insurance costs must continue to escalate. As are legal costs.
As insurance costs escalate, premiums must escalate. Forcing many to drop out of taking insurance.
Insurance serves the socially-necessary purpose of socialising financial risks. But the problem we have is that providing any kind of insurance through markets and profit is horrendously expensive and hopelessly inefficient. Coverage needs to be universal, so as to remove all that irrelevant and costly nonsense of first having to decide who's to blame and who pays.
I saw in the news the other day that about one-third of the houses incinerated in the recent Victorian bushfires were not insured. And more were under-insured. Due, so the story goes, to the fact that the Victorian government funds its fire-fighting infrastructure through a massive levy on home insurance premiums, adding to the cost of insurance by a factor of about 40%. So people in financial stress just cut home insurance from the budget.
Of course in this case those people are too many to be simply left high and dry. The government will have to pay, or those without insurance will get money from the public appeal, or both.
Market-based insurance is a means of socialising financial risk. Even in the context of a capitalist system, all private, for profit insurance should probably be proscribed and (in the cases where such insurance provides a social benefit) replaced by universal social insurance.
As it stands the insurance industry is worse than a mafia protection racket. Many kinds of policy should not even be allowed. For instance professional indemnity insurance for corporate executives. It certainly shouldn't be necessary for doctors to insure against medical mishaps, just because society as a whole has an ideological fixation on personal responsibility.
Why should it matter who's to blame, from the perspective of supporting the victim?
These are, obviously social responsibilities. Unavoidably so, as the outcome of the Victorian bushfires demonstrates clearly. It would be political suicide for any government to leave those home-owners without property insurance to suffer the consequences of their supposed financial irresponsibility. Society as a whole has to look after them. Whether or not they have insurance. The alternative is, literally, inconceivable. No politician has even dared hint at leaving them to suffer.
So what is the point of market based insurance? Its a dismal failure as an industry. The insurance industry is revealed for what it is, a parasite on the community. As useless as an old dog turd. An incompetent useless parasite on society. Even in the context of a capitalist system, the insurance industry is an ugly abomination.
Ban it.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell ta