We are on our way to Boulder today, and won’t return here until we have found a place to live down there. Boulder has its own vocabulary. Words like “spacious” and “open” do not mean there what they mean here. We are going to rent for a year and then buy something, and that year of renting will likely put us in a townhouse or condo, squished and compressed.
Something occurred to me as I was trying to answer some very legitimate questions over at Electric City Weblog. I have mentioned before that one of the reasons private insurance seems to work in the workplace is that employers tend to hire healthy people, so that workers are “pre-cherry-picked”, and the insurance companies’ job is done for them.
Then it dawned on me – every injury that might happen in the workplace is covered by Workers Compensation, so that insurance companies have even less exposure than they would otherwise have.
So health insurance companies have two reasons to cover the workplace: 1) pre-cherry-picking, and 2) shared risk.
What a deal!
Piece of Mindful 
A third reason: It’s a relatively unregulated/deregulated business. The feds take no interest, and states are generally ill-equipped to go up against insurance giants when disputes arise. There’s almost no policy review, or regulation to protect dissatisfied policy owners. You head straight to district court. In Montana, (BIG) advantage goes to Blue Cross-Blue Shield. If the White House and Congress can’t buck these guys, states haven’t a prayer. Consumers screwed naked.
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“Then it dawned on me – every injury that might happen in the workplace is covered by Workers Compensation, so that insurance companies have even less exposure than they would otherwise have.” Than they would otherwise have?
Do you mean “than they would otherwise have if insurance was not a contract between two consulting parties with defined risks and instead if you could just buy an ‘everything policy’ that covers everything that happens?
“It’s a relatively unregulated/deregulated business.” I stopped reading after that. It’s false.
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It’s the “I stopped reading after that…” part that bugs me about you guys. You’re shielded, unreachable.
But then, I grew up Catholic. I know how that works.
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It was a rhetorical statement, Mark. I finished reading her post. She just didn’t have much credibility with me after opening with a statement that I know to be categorically false from my daily experience.
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