Health Care Plan Idea

[King]

I'm no expert on health insurance, so please feel free to point out everything wrong with my idea.  This is just something that came to me while thinking in the shower.  It might be something that could be worked in as a compromise.  And if anything needs clarifying, please let me know..

Rather than have a public insurance company to compete with the private insurers, we establish a public finance company to make insurance prices more reasonable.  "Medibank" we'll call it in this example.

Let's say there is a person who works for a small company that doesn't provide health insurance for their employees and they need to find an insurance, but they can't afford a high premium.  Let's say $60/monthly is the max.  So, this person gets his $60/month insurance with a very high deductible to compensate ($4000/yearly).  Obviously, for most daily healthcare needs, this is a fairly worthless plan as it is very expensive with over $4000 needed a year for insurance to even kick in.

This is where applying for Medibank would help.   Along with his cheap insurance, he also applies and receives Medibank financing, which comes in the form of a bank card, has his insurer's logo in the corner, and is only accepted where his insurer is accepted.  It would work like a credit card, but with an extremely low interest rate of about 0.25% APR and a structured minimum payment system and is completely run by the government (the government isn't in this to make money so very low interest)  So example:

For the first 15 years of this program, he's in decent health.  He does the annual checkup, may gets a cold every now and then, but overally he never hits the $4000 deductible line.  He averages maybe $500 annually in medical expenses. He charges each visit/expense on Medibank and for the most part pays it off fairly quickly and doesn't have any debt owed on the card.

Then in year 16 in using this cheap insurer he suddenly finds out he needs a $150,000 heart surgery--covered by the plan, but needs to play the $4000 deductible and just can't afford that single payment at once.  With Medibank card, he can place the entire deductable (and whatever copay/coinsurance he might need to pay) onto Medibank and they will finance it for him.  So, he gets the surgery and now pays the following in the health insurance:

To the insurer: still $60 month premium
To Medibank: at least a minimum payment of 1% balance + whatever is compounded on the interest rate for the month... it'd probably be about $40 some dollars a month

So, this person, after surviving this $150k surgery is still paying a reasonably $100 a month on his health care and he gets to choose his insurance company and doctor and medical portfolio without any worry as the government would really have no control over that as they are just there to finance the bills.  It'd be like the Federal Student Loan program in a way.

Thinking about, there could be a problem with rapid debt accumulation if the person has an expensive long term medical condition and is suddenly charging $4000 a year and paying just minimum payments.  That would probably have to be worked out.  Any other issues, though?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This isn't a horribly thought out idea, but still doesn't solve the issues of insurance companies looking for every possible loophole to deny payment/treatment, denying service on the basis of a pre-existing condition, etc.

[King]

This isn't a horribly thought out idea, but still doesn't solve the issues of insurance companies looking for every possible loophole to deny payment/treatment, denying service on the basis of a pre-existing condition, etc.

Of course, there are still regulatory changes to be made.  But funding healthcare for all seems to be the biggest road block at this point.