Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Ask HN: Can the US insurance industry afford to pay for Covid-19?
6 points by 34679 on March 12, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
If not, can the healthcare industry afford to not be paid by the insurance industry?

edit:

Can the insurance industry even afford the costs of the testing that's about to be needed? If 60% of the 300,000,000 insured Americans need $10,000 worth of tests, that's $1.8 trillion.[1] The industry collected a total of $1.22T in premiums in 2018.[2]

[1][PDF]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/insur201905.pdf [2]https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-industry-overview



The healthcare industry can't afford to exist if they don't get paid by someone (whether that is the insurers or Medicare/Medicaid). We've seen mass closures of rural hospitals and medical practices as more rural Americans have lost insurance or gotten insurance that has large penalties for using said insurance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18kxPz4Z_g8

Insurers themselves are a mixed bag, many have gone broke as IIRC the gov't managed pool of money they were supposed to pull out of/put money into to ensure no insurer went under from too many unhealthy, newly insured people has been starved of funding under our current administration.


One option is the government can subsidize tests, so that $10,000 becomes $5,000. It's in their best interests to do so.

I also doubt 300M will need testing - by that stage, if everyone is infected, what's the point of testing? It'll probably only be done for the first million at best.

I suppose hospitals are going to want to claim as many tests as possible for the $$$ but at some point the insurers would realize this is ridiculous and stop approving them.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: