More thoughts on Health Insurance

So we're trying to solve a lot of problems at once with all the health care debate. One of them seems to be that people can't find affordable health care. I should have done this a long time ago, but just this morning, I shopped around for health insurance for the first time. A site called ehealthinsurance came up and I no longer believe that it's not possible for people to find affordable health insurance.

Before you disagree with me, let me define a few things. By health insurance, I mean partial coverage for future, uncertain, catastrophic events. In my opinion, this is what insurance was created to do and when we try to use it for something other than it's intended purpose, we will obviously run into some problems.

Insurance wasn't designed to cover events that have already happened. You can't buy home insurance on a burning house and expect them to fix it. And you can't expect us to manage pre-exsisting conditions in the same way that we manage future, uncertain, catastrophic events.

My point is, there are a lot of issues out there and we need to look at each them individually in order to find the best solution.

I'm going to attempt to list out the separate issues that seem to be lumped together when discussing health care reform.

Increased costs
1. Increased costs due to inflation
2. Increased costs due to lifestyle
3. Increased costs due to increased coverage
4. Increased costs due to better care
5. Increased costs due to medical malpractice
6. Increased costs due to medical malpractice insurance
7. Increased costs due to doctor fraud
8. Increased costs due to patient fraud
9. Increased costs due to an increased number marginally decreasingly effective medical procedures
10. Increased costs due to uninsured patients' care
11. Increased costs due to uninsured patients' use of emergency room care
12. Increased costs due to aging and the correlated increased risk of illness
13. Increased costs due to increased out-of-pocket expenses during prolonged illnesses.
14. Increased costs due to a lower risk group subsidizing a higher risk group
15. Increased costs due to increased risk of future, uncertain, catastrophic events
16. Increased costs due to increased cost of future, certain, catastrophic events
17. Increased costs due to increased cost of future, uncertain, normal events
18. Increased costs due to increased cost of future, certain, normal events

Uninsured
1. Uninsured because they don't want insurance
2. Uninsured because of a preexisting condition
3. Uninsured because of the high cost of the desired insurance plan
4. Uninsured because they don't want a cheaper plan with less coverage
5. Uninsured because a cheaper plan with less coverage is not available
6. Uninsured because of citizenship
7. Uninsured because of loss of employment
8. Uninsured because they are no longer covered on their parents plan
9. Uninsured because their policy was canceled
10. Uninsured because their policy was not renewed when it expired

Limits
1. Limits on maximum annual payments
2. Limits on maximum lifetime payments
3. Limits on approved medical tests
4. Limits on covered events
5. Limits on out-of-pocket expenses

I don't think I've listed out every aspect of health insurance, but my point is there is no silver bullet that is going to address each of these issues. Mainly, I'm just frustrated that politicians don't approach the topic of health care in any sort of deliberate or well-thought out way.

None of their proposed solutions are linked back to the problems they are attempting to correct. And none of the politicians give an objective and intelligent analysis of the proposed solution's effect on the issues at hand. If there is a politician that is doing this, please point me in the right direction.