The reason we have the system we do is because government incentivizes company-provided health insurance. We should instead encourage people to select their own plans.

Wrong again..... The aca was simply a plan to get the uninsured rate down. They offered both incentives to companies and individuals to achieve this goal. Before the aca individual plans were not even offered by insurance companies. These individual plans were actually really robust, especially with medication cost, better than even my current private insurance. However, Republicans sponsored by the insurance lobbyist slowly ate away at the funding and requirements, making the individual plans basically useless, culminating with the abolishment of the mandate during the trump administration.

Auto insurance seems to work just fine with this. If I make lots of claims with one insurer, that slate won't just be wiped clean with the next one.

Are you a motorized vehicle? What makes you think insuring an entire population is similar to insuring a inanimate object? I've already pointed out that it is illegal to charge people a higher premium because of their preconditions or prior use. And if it was legal this would either lead to people being uninsurable, or would collapse the insurance pool.

A rebuttal that you have not acknowledged this entire discourse.

customers can easily switch, that should encourage insurance companies to lock in customers with longer term policies to spread out the risk.

Do you not see the internal contradictions of "customers can easily switch" and "lock in customers with longer term policies"?

The insurance company doesn't expect any particular individual customer to be profitable, they just expect that their customers will be profitable on average.

Which is not true with healthcare...... Not on a long enough timeline. Which is why insurance companies boot people to Medicaid or Medicare when they start to become a financial burden. If they are forced to provide coverage past the age of 65 then there is no possibility for a return. We all end up eventually receiving more healthcare than we pay for.

For an insurance company, it's like buying an index fund instead of individual stocks, and for individuals it's like buying an annuity instead of stocks

Again, you are ignorant of the fundamental differences of health insurance when compared to ensuring inanimate objects. At this point it seems like you are purposely being obtuse, so I'm assuming you lack the mental plasticity to change your mind regardless of any new information or perspective.

haven't run the numbers for a couple years (I compared ACA when self-employed vs new company), so things could have changed.

Aca self funded plans have significantly reduced their coverage and network size since the mandate went away. The original plans were actually a pretty decent deal, but they're pretty worthless by now.

Maybe. But that's also assuming healthcare costs stay stagnant. If we drastically reduce the complexity of dealing with insurance, we also reduce the costs to insurance, which may be enough to offset an increase in claims.

Again, if you are going to be standardizing these private organizations to the point where you dictate their operating procedures, what's the point of privatizes healthcare?

All the paperwork is waste, and it's getting to be a massive problem, but it suffers from a prisoner's dilemma-type issue (an individual company is better off complicating the process in the short term, but if everyone does that, net costs go up) so the current setup won't resolve itself.

Yes, it seems like every one of these "non profit" private insurance companies are prioritizing profit over service......Strange.

Insurance companies exist to cover extreme financial burdens, like developing cancer or other chronic conditions. Basically, things that could bankrupt you.

No, private insurance companies exist to extract public funds from the government at the expense of its citizenry. The entire point of a healthcare system, is to improve the health of the entire population, not individuals. Private health insurance damages the system, and does nothing to improve it.

The issue with ER is that it often goes against your will, and getting financial consent could be the difference between life and death.

Bahahaha, what? You don't have to take financial consent to treat someone at an ER. You don't need ID, or insurance paperwork, or even an address. What do you think we do with people who are unconscious upon arrival? We don't just stick them in the waiting room until they miraculously wake up.

As I said, you are making huge assumptions without a very basic understanding of healthcare. One of the reasons hospitals are inherently a natural monopoly nis because there is no choice often. You can't dictate where your ambulance goes, and we can't turn down a person in need.

There's just way too many weird cases to the point where we can't just expect insurance companies to take the hit here.

Lol, insurance companies do not take the hit, we do. The cost is covered by the hospital, and its burden is redistributed via raising price of healthcare.

Publicly funded ER solves those problems and can protect emergency care providers from lawsuits and whatnot so they can focus on providing care.

And again this would just lead to people using the ER more than they already so.

The ER would reject you and potentially fine you for nonemergency care. Just like calling 911 for non-emergencies.

First of all, this is once again illegal. But more importantly bits highly immoral and violates the Hippocratic Oath. No ER provider is going to turn away a patient in need of emergency medicine.

And of course you will say, that they can turn away non emergent care. But this just proves you lack of understanding of the healthcare system in general. Minor ailments that go untreated will eventually turn into actual emergencies. So it doesn't matter if you turn them away, or worse fine them, they will eventually come back in worse condition.

The only way to lower emergent healthcare cost is to provide affordable/free preventative care and education . Take for example the diabetic shoe program, every diabetic with peripheral neuropathy in America is eligible for diabetic shoes and custom inserts. At one point as a cost saving measure they cut this service, which ended up costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in the long run due to the increased incidents of wound care and amputations.

It's a much more complicated system then you would like to assume.