Quote from Virtuoso:
Mav,
Perhaps I am missing something, but why is it that healthcare wold go through the roof if drugs were legalized?
Well, most insurance companies are going to raise premiums through the roof. Not like they are not doing that already. But they will go even higher. Alcohol, tobacco products, and obesity create a huge strain on our healthcare system. The way our healthcare system deals with this problem is by screening people for these problems when they start a new policy and by raising the averages of everyone.
See look, let's just say when you filled out your blue cross blue shield form and you told them you are a moderate smoker and drinker right. Now they have statistical tables that tell them on average how much it's going to cost them to insure you over your lifetime. Now, if they actually priced in that cost to your policy, you would pay something like 10k a month for insurance and probably would not take the policy. So they skew the avg cost of every policy holder to make you fit into their policy. In other words, they may charge you more money then they charge me, but in order to keep your cost reasonable, they charge everyone else a slightly higher premium.
They do this with auto insurance as well. Well, all insurance. So that is why healthcare premiums in this country for everybody, not just the unhealthy people, have gone through the roof the last 10 years. All the smokers, drinkers, and obese people are paying more then the avg person, but the avg person is paying substantially more then if the unhealthy people were removed from the population pool. They have to do it this way for reasons I just stated.
So if we legalized pot, basically you could expect everyone's premiums to go up substantially whether they used pot or not. Now as a pot user, your premiums might be still 20% higher then mine, when in reality, they should be 50% to 75% higher but then you would never pay that much money.
See, it works the same way as an option on a stock. In fact many people in the insurance industry go into derivatives later on life because they price them very similar. See, options are very rarely priced accurately on big moves, because they can't be. If option's were priced what they should be, it would create lopsided markets. So premiums are set so that there is enough paper on both sides to facilitate trade. Same thing with insurance premiums. If a very obese person would pay what he should be paying, he would never buy insurance because it would cost him 50k a year to have a policy.
So insurance companies average his expected cost into everyone else's policy. Now let's say those health insurance premiums do go through the roof, well what will happen. Well, even more people will go without insurance, many of those will be the actual pot smokers and many of them will be families who simply cannot afford to get basic coverage for their whole family because they can't pay the higher premiums.
Now the gov't gets f*cked on this because now, there are even more people without insurance and what will they do? They will simply use the free emergency room whenever they have a healthcare problem. This would put a huge burden on our emergency care in this country and ultimately it would shut it down. They wouldn't have any choice. So then in order to pay for it, the gov't would have no choice but to raise taxes substantially to pay for all that. Again, increasing the burden on working class families.
So basically, it's a lose lose proposition for everyone. Those who smoke pot and even more of a burden to those that don't because healthcare cost will go even higher and taxes will go up substantially. This is why in my opinion you will never see legalized drugs in this country unless, like I said earlier, if you somehow remove the drug users from the entire healthcare system including private insurance.
BTW, before you even ask about why are they not doing this with alcohol, tobacco and obese people, trust me, they are working on it as we speak. I think you are going to see massive changes in our healthcare system in the next 5 to 10 years regardless of which party is in the White House. And the unhealthy people are going to pay a very heavy price for their lifestyle choices. It's the only thing we can do to get healthcare cost down. We really don't have a choice here.
