Saturday, July 25, 2009

Medical Savings and Loan - The Domain

With health care reform on everyone's tongues, I wanted to find a way to drum up interested in the Medical Savings and Loan idea.

Being of limited imagination, I pushed my small grey brain cells to their maximum limit and decided to buy the domain MedicalSavingsAndLoan.com.

My intention is to continue writing all of my thoughts on Medical Savings Accounts in my blog. Readers of this blog know that I really think some wild thoughts. I suspect that many people who like the concept of MS&Ls would like to talk about the concept, but really don't want to link to that crazy gentile.

My hope is that people who find the Medical Savings and Loan an intriguing idea will link to the concept site. The concept site will only have a small number of pages including a link page back to everyone who blogs writes about the idea.

If you blog about this idea; tell me about your post and your post is actually about the subject; then I will link back to you.

3 comments:

RD said...

Why isn't health insurance handled more like other investment funds, rather then paying a monthly premium why don't we pay a contribution that buys us shares in a fund similar to a mutual fund. A mutual Health fund rather then paying out interest would use the interest to cover medical costs. Any left over interest could then be payed back to shares based on each share holders expense rate across the fund. Compensation could work just like a normal mutual fund as well, payed from a commission from share purchases and yearly interest generated by the fund. Put some rules in to allow people to move the funds from one health mutual fund to another.

Employers rather then matching employee contributions could directly invest in the fund and the interest gains would go to cover medical costs of their employee's, this has the side benefit of encouraging employers to encourage healthy working conditions and other health improving programs as lower medical payouts would return more of their interest back to them.

This would remove the problem of retirement insurance coverage and would allow medicare to be slowly phased out or funds redirected to cover the poor or others that would have issues making the $50-100 month payment schedule.

From age 18 to age 26 the entire interest should be entirely payed back into the account. If you started paying $50-100 per month at age 18 due to a individual mandate by the time you lose coverage on your parents insurance at age 26 you would easily have a large enough investment to for the interest to cover medical costs when placed in a risk pool with others of the same age group and still have plenty of interest left over to pay back into the account to continue to grow the account to cover costs.

Not saying that it would work or is even a good idea, just throwing it out their. Hopefully something can be done to fix our broken system.

y-intercept said...

Insurance companies have massive investment portfolios and the gains from their portfolio usually go back into the product.

There is not enough guaranteed interest anywhere to fund all health care on paper gains alone.

The history of health care is that people keep looking for more and more complex solutions; I think the better approach is to seek out simplicity.

Scott Hinrichs said...

Just for the record, I have no problems linking my posts to crazy gentiles.