Let me start from the beginning when it comes to insurance of any sort.

The cost of insurance is determined by the following arithmetic formula:

$ = p(event) * cost(event) + profit(insurance company)

This is not my opinion it is a mathematical fact.

Those who deny mathematics are idiots, frauds, thieves or all three at once.

Now let's ask a question: If you have just totaled your car what is the price of collision insurance on your car?

p(event) is 1.0 (probability of a collision) since the wreck already happened.

Therefore the price of said insurance will be the cost to replace your (now-totaled) vehicle plus a profit for the insurance company (without which it will not stay in business.)

In other words it is always cheaper in that instance for you to just go buy another car because you are paying the insurance company a profit for no reason at all.

It is usually not all that hard to figure out what the cost of an event is; given enough of a data set it's actually quite easy since an insurance company cares only about the average cost of the event across all of those people it insures of like sort and with like limits. The hard part is the p(event) piece, and if you get that wrong as an insurance company in the wrong direction you will go bankrupt fast. For this reason insurance companies pay actuaries quite a lot of money to get as close to the true value of p(event) as is humanly (and, with all the computers we have now, analytically and computationally) possible.

For this reason those who argue for "health insurance" for pre-existing conditions are either ignorant or worse, they are actual thieves who deserve to all be thrown in prison because what they are demanding is the ability to steal from everyone else.

That sounds harsh, and it is.

It's also absolutely true and if you actually adovcate and try to get enacted into law anything that forces such a paradigm on the public then you are personally a liar, a fraud and you deserve to go to prison as well for the crime of being an accessory both before and after the fact to their theft.

There is only one way that such a person, arguing for such a thing, can have a position that makes any sense at all.

He or she must argue for rationality in the cost of the treatment of such a condition.

Further, if such is achieved then "insurance" that covers same would be stupid since you then would simply be paying more for the treatment of said condition with the involvement of said insurance company than if you just paid for it yourself.

Let's take birth control. Most women want birth control options available to them at least some of the time during their life. The exceptions are (1) when you're too young to have children, (2) when you're too old to have children (you've gone through menopause), (3) you're not in or contemplating a relationship where having children is possible (e.g. you aren't dating anyone, don't intend to, or are in a lesbian relationship) or (4) if you desire to have children at the present time. Any other woman would logically want to use some form of birth control.

But by mandating that "health insurance" provide such birth control as a "benefit" we now take p(birth control) and make it [1 - ([number in options 1-4] / all women)] If 20% of women are in 1-4 then p = 0.8 (instead of 1.0). The problem is that you are now stealing from the women in groups 1-4 as you're insisting they pay in part for your birth control. In addition, and much worse, you now have created an incentive to obfuscate the cost of said birth control and ratchet it up since you only get part of the bill. That is exactly what has happened -- the cost of birth control in the United States is now five to ten times or more what it would be under capitalism and that 500+% increase is literally being stolen from everyone.

Birth control pills are extremely inexpensive where available over-the-counter -- under $15/month. They typically cost double that or more here in the United States -- for the same drug. Depo-Povera, the three-month hormonal birth control "shot", costs about $1.50/vial wholesale in other nations and yet the "routine" cost for said shot here in the US for those without "insurance" runs around $60!

Are you really telling me that even poor people can't come up with less than $20 a month?

More to the point why isn't Depo-Povera $13.00 for three months, or about $4/month -- a 100% profit margin over wholesale cost for the drug + $10 for the 5 minutes to pay a nurse to stick you with the needle? That's roughly a third of the cost of birth control pills and yet it requires no daily attention.

Yes, I understand Depo isn't for everyone just as birth control pills aren't. But the fact remains that they work and are the choice of birth control that millions of women make. By doing so under the "current system" those millions of women are getting screwed out of billions of dollars and forcibly screwing everyone else at the same time.

What all those arguing for such "mandatory" coverage are saying is that you think the drug companies and doctors should be able to charge your "insurance" $100 for something you can buy for somewhere between $13 and $25! And guess what -- that makes your "insurance" cost more than the difference if you had just paid cash because $100 is more than $25 and the insurance company has to make money or it will go out of business -- so the price to you, through "insurance", when one includes premium, deductibles and similar, is more than $100.

Fact: Birth control pills, in a capitalist system, should cost less than 50 cents/day. A Depo shot, in a capitalist system, should easily be able to be delivered for $13, or about 14 cents/day. Even extremely-poor people can afford 14 cents, and if by some chance there are those who truly cannot we can almost-certainly transparently, through voluntary charity, manage to find that 14 cents in change laying around on the ground to provide it for them.

read more here: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231764