Thursday, November 17, 2005

What I learned in Contracts today: WE HATE INSURANCE COMPANIES. We will rule against them every time, even if we have to make up a new legal doctrine to do it.

6 comments:

Monica said...

Gonna make sure I get you for my contract problems. :- ) Besides, after debate, I bet we can make up legal doctrine by the boatload. And rediscover it every week too. ;- )

Anonymous said...

Wicked, tricksy, false companies. We hates them, yes, we does. Family experience. They seem to be one of the few lines of business that can screw people without suffering market consequences.

The insurance companies do tend to lose the reported cases, and sometimes the courts get creative with the law. Why? Is it just that we hate the companies? Or do we hate seeing the little guy get screwed, so we bend the law, and the insurance company loses because it is the one most likely to screw people? Or do most judges have an inherent sense that most of the time the company is going to get away with being bad, so on those few occasions where the big bad company is in court, the judge makes sure the company gets smacked to make up for all the times it gets off.

Anonymous said...

It's sad that we spend lots of money paying for different kinds of insurance--just on the off chance that we may need to use it.
I think everyone would be better off if we all paid for our own health care, instead of everyone paying for others by insurance. HC costs would definitely go down!

Monica said...

You know though, maybe HC costs wouldn't really go down. What if it really did stratify health care availabitliy even more than it is now? I'm not fully convinced that MDs would need the business so much that they would lower prices. They could probably just keep their prices the same and have a richer clientele, or they could raise prices and cater even higher on the social scale to make up the difference.

Becca said...

There could be truth on both sides. HC costs could go down some (at least some doctors probably have a conscience), but Monica is probably right that there will still be people who can't afford HC. Could it be, though, that insurance isn't the bet equalizer because it's in it for profit (and a lot of it)? As much as we hate socialism, does it have a place at all in HC? At least in part of it? Maybe not the research sector, or some areas of advanced medicine so as to continue to incentivize development, but maybe in at least some general practice (read "preventative health" areas. Of course, good luck getting THAT through Congress with all the lobby power of the AMA...

Monica said...

A little socialism might work in theory, but I don't know how much it would work in practice. It requires us to trust that there are at least some people that aren't self-interested, and I'm not sure there are enough to make a program like that work. You know? If you leave parts of it incentivized, it kinda makes sense that the MDs are going to gravitate to that part. There would have to be some pretty strong incentives in place to keep the docs from setting up their own for-profit practices. Maybe the gov could subsidize their income, but that's going to be based on the avergage of everybody else's salary, and that would make it prohibitively expensive again.