Dec. 15, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:25
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| No, healthcare is brutal, man. | |
| It's a brutal thing. | |
| Because, you know, I posted this on Locals, freedomend.locals.com. | |
| I would have a lot more sympathy about Americans' complaints about the price of healthcare, the cost of healthcare, if they weren't so fat and unhealthy. | |
| I have four burgers today and have moved off the couch. | |
| I'm now going to post at how unbelievably horrible it is that healthcare is so expensive. | |
| Not a shock. | |
| Now, of course, America does spend a lot on healthcare, but America is also a very wealthy country. | |
| I mean, in Ontario, Canada, did you know that people in Ontario, Canada, which is the richest province in Canada, are poorer than the people in the poorest state in America? | |
| Like Mississippi or whatever it is, right? | |
| So Americans do spend more on healthcare, but that's in part because Americans are fat and Americans are relatively wealthy. | |
| If you've not traveled, like Europe is terrible for wealth. | |
| I mean, you've probably seen this graphic of like the number of European corporations of a billion dollars or more that are relatively recent, and it's tiny compared to America. | |
| America is not only the R&D engine of the world with regards to healthcare, but America is the economic engine of the world. | |
| But healthcare is tough. | |
| Healthcare is tough because, you know, how many people, like, what is insurance for? | |
| I mean, sorry, I'll just keep this real basic and real quick, right? | |
| So what is insurance for? | |
| Insurance is for catastrophic things, right? | |
| You don't buy insurance for, oh, I stubbed my toe. | |
| Or you don't buy insurance for, I need a health checkup. | |
| You buy insurance for the weird shit that's hard to predict, that just kind of comes out of nowhere and is ferociously expensive, right? | |
| Like, so, what, 13 years ago or whatever, I got cancer. | |
| And... | |
| No particular history, no particular lifestyle issues, just got some bad luck, just had some bad luck. | |
| And it could be, of course, because my father let me quaff weed killer when I was a kid, so that might have caught up with me, right? | |
| So, you need insurance for that shit, right? | |
| Because that stuff could just kind of come out of nowhere. | |
| But it's rare. | |
| So that's what you would have it for. | |
| Like car insurance is for when things go really bad in a car crash. | |
| Car insurance is not for I need an oil change, right? | |
| All the predictable stuff. | |
| If it's predictable, it's not the purview or purvey of insurance. | |
| Insurance is for the unpredictable, right? | |
| And insurance has to be when it hasn't happened yet. | |
| You can't call and say, oh, hey, my house is on fire. | |
| I really need some fire insurance for my house. | |
| It's not supposed to happen that way. | |
| So healthcare should be... | |
| Mostly paid for, private, for the repetitive stuff. | |
| You should get paid well for prevention, right? | |
| So if you go for an annual checkup, if you get your blood work done and so on, then you should be rewarded for that. | |
| You would be rewarded for that. | |
| If you maintained a healthy weight, if you didn't smoke, and, you know, the smoking stuff, I remember I got tested for nicotine presence when I was getting insurance as part of selling my software company because I was so important to the software company that they wanted to make sure I wasn't going to drop dead from emphysema or something. | |
| So that's how insurance is supposed to work. | |
| Now, of course, as you know, the sort of very brief history is that why is it that employers are paying for your healthcare? | |
| Well, employees pay for your healthcare because in the Second World War, the sort of fascistic FDR regime said to people, said to companies, you can't pay people more. | |
| You can't increase their salary. | |
| And so companies, instead of increasing people's salaries, they offered to pay their Healthcare insurance instead, which was a big single-item issue for a lot of people. | |
| And so that's just why companies got into paying people's healthcare costs. | |
| And this, of course, was a problem because when you switch to jobs, you lost the benefit, right? | |
| So you know how insurance is supposed to work. | |
| I first got life insurance in my early 20s and I did not. | |
| I haven't needed to pay for life insurance in forever and ever. | |
| Amen. | |
| Because it was all invested and paid for years ago. | |
| So you're supposed to get life insurance when you're young. | |
| You put a little bit of money in because your odds of dying young are very low. | |
| And then by the time you get into your 40s and 50s, it should basically be free, right? | |
| So that's how. | |
| And you're supposed to have relatively low insurance when you're young and healthy, as long as you stay healthy, right? | |
| You get the right blood work, you get the right lung capacity, you get the right regular heartbeat, you get the right BMI and all of that. | |
| So it's supposed to be relatively cheap. | |
| Now... | |
| And you're supposed to have price signals in that your insurance is going to go up if you get into dangerous territory, right? | |
| So... | |
| What happened was because employers were paying people's health insurance and switching jobs meant you got reassessed as an older person for more health insurance. | |
| You should have one relationship with a health insurer your whole life as best you can because you pay little when you're young and then you accumulate value so it's not as expensive when you get older. | |
| So it gave employers a huge amount of power and control over their employees, right? | |
| Because if you got fired, then you lost your health insurance or you'd have to go to some new place and then they'd have to reassess you from the ground up and then you'd end up, they don't want to hire you if you've got health issues and so on. | |
| So it's just, you know, one government control leads to another government control leads to another government control. | |
| So then, of course, what happened was, People would lose their health insurance even when they had chronic issues, and then they would get to a new job, they'd apply for new health insurance, and the new insurer would say, well, no, you've got a chronic health issue. | |
| We don't want to insure you because that's like calling up for fire insurance on your home when your home is currently burning down. | |
| It doesn't work that way at all, right? | |
| So, because people... | |
| Could be denied for pre-existing conditions. | |
| One of the impetus is behind Obamacare, which passed because of the Somali vote in Al Franken's district. | |
| So, one of the reasons for Obamacare was to say to insurance companies, you can't deny people for pre-existing conditions. | |
| Which, a retarded squirrel could realize how that was going to play out. | |
| Well, you can't deny people for pre-existing conditions. | |
| So, what's going to happen? | |
| Well, people are going to wait until they get sick, and then they're going to apply for health insurance. | |
| Right? | |
| So then people waited till they got sick and then they applied for health insurance and so the rates went through the roof. | |
| Now, in order for insurance to work, some not small number of non-sick people have to be paying into the system. | |
| In order for fire insurance to work, people whose houses aren't currently burning down have to be in the system. | |
| So when you said to people, you said to insurance companies, you can't deny people for pre-existing conditions, which comes out of the control that the employers have over the health insurance, Then people wait until they get sick and then they apply for health insurance, which means that the premiums go through the roof. | |
| Now, once the premiums go through the roof, young people who are required to fund the healthcare systems for older people with regards to insurance, young people pay more than they take out and they do that so that the value accumulates and they end up having it for free later or at least heavily cheap. | |
| So if you can't get young and healthy people into the system because the premiums have gone so high because only people who are sick are applying for health insurance and young people drop out of the system, and then the whole system doesn't work. | |
| So then you have to have Obamacare in to force everyone to buy health insurance because people don't want it. | |
| But the moment that people are forced to buy health insurance, everybody with an obscure illness wants to tack on their own Shibboleth and Bugaboo into the healthcare system so people who have, I don't know, people who need IVF treatments want it covered by insurance even though young single people, |
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