All are welcome to attend this lecture by Benjamin Rush Institute executive director, Dr. Beth Haynes. Dr. Haynes will explain the differences between health insurance and actual access to healthcare, and how understanding this is key to understanding the current problems of healthcare access and affordability.
We will be serving lunch food.
POST-EVENT SUMMARY: Dr. Haynes spoke on health insurance and how health insurance in its current form is not really insurance. She explained how health insurance prices are set, and why premiums keep getting higher and higher. Rising premiums are causing younger people to not see health insurance as financially feasible, leading to more people utilizing Medicaid as their “health insurance.” The loss of underwriting in health insurance policies is a big problem, along with risk-pooling. It has created a death spiral similar to what Ludwig von Mises talks about when government gets involved in industries it has no business being in.
Dr. Haynes gave an example of how expensive health insurance is from David Goldhill’s book, Catastrophic Care: Why Everything We Think We Know About Healthcare is Wrong. An example is someone in her mid 20’s who is making $35k annually, and how when it is all said and done about $10k goes to paying for just her health insurance. Over the course of her life, about 2/3rds of her income goes to health insurance alone. Dr. Haynes compared health insurance to auto, home, and life insurance, and talked about how these other types of insurance are different than most health insurance plans.
After Dr. Haynes talk, the eleven students that attended ended up asking questions and having a discussion for another 45 minutes or so. We talked about solutions to fix this problem, along with other problems that need to be addressed and ways to focus on allowing innovation in health care and health insurance.