Noah Suranyi: Health insurance never meant to cover everyday medical costs

To The Daily Sun,

The American medical industry is often seen as problematic due to many issues, the main one being the expensive and rising costs of even the simplest of procedures or medications. To examine why this is, we can take a look at a hypothetical situation.

Bob.

Bob is a man with $100 to spare. He needs medicine and now has to face America’s private health care system head-on. Let’s assume Bob does the most straightforward things and spends his $100 on his medicine. Bob is inclined to get a good deal on his medicine since he is paying out of pocket. If everyone was Bob, then everyone else would be inclined to get medicine at lower prices. This would cause the price of medications to go down as people are incentivized to purchase lower-priced medications.

But everyone is not Bob and Bob knows this. Instead, long before he needed medications, he bought health insurance. Now that he needs medication, he is not incentivized to pay a low price because he knows his insurance covers it. Now Bob is stuck paying an expensive health insurance plan and medicine prices stay higher because nobody is incentivized to buy lower-priced medicine.

Health insurance was never even meant to cover everyday medical costs — only big and expensive surgeries or procedures that one couldn’t afford were meant to be covered. Car insurance doesn’t cover routine repairs so why should health insurance cover routine medicine costs? If health insurance only came into play when we needed it then it would work. We are playing a zero-sum game where we are dooming ourselves by making health insurance cover everything whilst corporate insurance and hospital officials get to reek the benefits of expensive health care to the expense of doctors and patients.

Noah Suranyi

Gilford