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My grandfather's idea on health care
Mar. 23rd, 2004 02:08 pmPapa Tuny is a dentist -- has practiced and taught for decades. He mentioned today that, forty or fifty years ago, he suggested a way to handle dental insurance which he felt would make it cost-effective for insurance companies to provide. They didn't go for it, obviously, and now dental insurance is very expensive because it's not very cost-effective. But I thought his idea was interesting, and might work for other areas of medicince besides dentistry.
Papa Tuny's idea was that the first year you buy dental insurance, it pays 50% of needed work, while the other 50% is out of pocket. The next year, 60%, year after that, 70%, and so forth. It might top out at 80%, it might go up to 100%, depending how the numbers worked.
But if you skipped one checkup, you dropped down to the 50% level, and had to work back up.
Because dentistry is an area of medicine where preventative medicine is MUCH cheaper than restorative. So this would give a strong incentive to the insured to maintain all the preventative stuff.
Thoughts about this? Is my grandfather's idea a good one for dentistry? Are there other areas of medicine where prevention is so much cheaper than curing -- and where "prevention" is so easily defined and tracked -- that this could be useful?
Papa Tuny's idea was that the first year you buy dental insurance, it pays 50% of needed work, while the other 50% is out of pocket. The next year, 60%, year after that, 70%, and so forth. It might top out at 80%, it might go up to 100%, depending how the numbers worked.
But if you skipped one checkup, you dropped down to the 50% level, and had to work back up.
Because dentistry is an area of medicine where preventative medicine is MUCH cheaper than restorative. So this would give a strong incentive to the insured to maintain all the preventative stuff.
Thoughts about this? Is my grandfather's idea a good one for dentistry? Are there other areas of medicine where prevention is so much cheaper than curing -- and where "prevention" is so easily defined and tracked -- that this could be useful?