Grow your own health insurance
Well, it makes sense in Africa at least:
The bigger push is coming from everyday Africans who are tired of waiting for politicians to address their needs and have begun spinning their own safety nets.
Plans in which neighbors come together and create their own makeshift health coverage are the rage in Africa, particularly in the continent’s west. Here, the plans now have a significant presence in 11 countries and membership has grown beyond 200,000 people.
Some of these mutual health organizations, as they are known, include fewer than 100 beneficiaries. The tiny group negotiates with a local clinic and forges a better price for care. Others have linked dozens of community groups to produce sophisticated plans that cover 10,000 or more people and offer an array of services.
“Every day there’s a new group,” said Olivier Louis Dit Guerin, who helps set up these microinsurance plans as part of a program run by the Labor Organization. “They’re growing and growing to fill the big gap.”
It’s perhaps useful to note that it would be impossible to do the same thing in the United States because of overly cumbersome insurance regulations. I’m not suggesting that the same kind of problem exists here in the US as it does in Africa, but perhaps these micro-insurers could be answers to different problems we face here in the US. Unfortunately we’ll never know with the current crop of regulations and vested interests.
It’s totally against the insurance companies interests for these sorts of groups to exist, so there is a general push from the insurance companies for federal regulation to keep the upstarts out of business. This is also why tobacco companies *want* to be regulated by the FDA. Of course, each company pushes against regulation when it impinges on their operations, companies are only in favor of regulation if it helps keep newcomers out of “their” market. Keep that in mind next time you see companies shilling for federal regulation… it’s just a cheap way of keeping entry costs high.
Of course, I’m not attempting to draw the conclusion that all regulation is bad, of course it isn’t. I like the EPA, and I like not breathing smog. I may not like all of the EPA’s policies, but I certainly approve of its existence. (I’d estimate that slightly less than a quarter of all federal regulations have a net positive effect, 3/8ths have a net negative effect, and the remaining regulations have either no effect or have other effects which are hard to analyze as “good” or “bad”.)
Anyway. Read the Africa story; to a certain extent it could be argued that it’s evidence that human societies have some sort of self-organization. That was my real point of this post.