Re: [] Same Song & Dance . . .
It continues to baffle me that so few people understand how insurance works. I tried to resist, but I'm afraid I have to take this speaker's corner.
Insurance works on a premise;
that in a group of people only a fraction will suffer from X but that it is difficult to impossible to predict the distribution of said fraction..
Two points need stressing:
- Only a fraction will run into X.
If everybody would suffer from X, it would be impossible to buy insurance for it. The reason is economical; insurance companies would go bankrupt.
To illustrate, let X be hair growth. Imagine a completely bald species where one in every hundred individuals can suddenly develop some sort of rapid hair growth. I guarantee you, there would be an insurance company that supplies razor blades.
In our world, everybody grows hair. So we pay for our own visits to the barber shop.
- Second point; it is difficult to impossible to predict who will suffer from X.
If X were entirely predictable, non-carriers of X would have a problem sharing the cost. Let X be menstruation. Wonder why there is no insurance for tampons? It's too obvious what part of the population will need them at some point.
For the logic inclined; the previous point about fractions is just a consequence of this one. If the fraction is equal to the whole population, predictability is trivial.
Next, it is important to realize that
social healthcare through taxes is just a form of government regulated insurance. I'm not saying whether it's a good or bad thing (that's outside of this discussion) but it's important to realize that social healthcare works on the premise outlined above, just like insurance companies do.
Let us look at some scenarios:
- The plane crash in Kansas.
Insurance makes sense here (for most countries, that would be through government regulated taxing) because not every plane that takes off is guaranteed to crash, nor is it predictable (a priori) that this plane headed for Kansas would crash.
- A baby born with severe handicaps.
Insurance makes sense here, since we can not accurately predict which babies will or won't be affected.
But it gets interesting now. What about the mother who smokes, drinks and uses drugs during her pregnancy? Suddenly we tweak the predictability factor, and insurance starts making less sense.
- What about a life-long smoker developing lung cancer?
Predictability becomes easier yet again, and insurance gets complicated. Already we see countries toy with the idea of giving non-smokers priority on waiting lists.
- What about BASE jumping?
Depending on the group, predictability can be easy or difficult. Take the entire population as the group and it's very easy to predict that BASE jumpers will be hurt on a BASE jump (this is important) more often than non-BASE jumpers. In other words, predictability is high so insurance makes less sense.
Take only the subgroup of BASE jumpers and it becomes harder to predict who will get hurt badly and who will only hurt his pinky finger. Predictability goes down significantly, and suddenly insurance becomes a useful tool again.
Anybody who still agrees at this point that BASE jumpers need to be saved at all cost fall for a stubborn myth;
that unconditional support for fellow human beings is a moral necessity and practical possibility. Let me attack the moral necessity first...
You can save a life today by donating hundred dollars to your nearest third-world-country charitable organization. Perhaps some of those organizations are inefficient or corrupt, but it is easily provable that a hundred dollars can save a life somewhere with relative ease. I'm also convinced that you don't need that hundred dollar to stay alive for the next little while.
So why don't you?
If you think government regulated insurance (through social healthcare) makes sense, then why doesn't this argument extrapolate to a worldwide insurance? After all, you couldn't predict where you were born.
Perhaps unconditional support is a moral obligation on some ethical scale (
Peter Singer has some interesting articles about this), but not on mine per se, and I don't see the world around me disagree.
Now let us consider the practical reality of such unconditional support. The fact of the matter is, our healthcare systems are already under enormous amounts of economic stress. But hear the outcry of the tax-payer if the goverment asks for more to boost healthcare. I predict this will only get worse. We have no other options but to transition to a world in which healthcare is applied conditionally. Additional support will have to come from more and more privatized insurance.
And unless you send a hundred dollars to Africa (with apologies to the continent) and agree to pay more taxes, you'll have to come to terms with this.
...including making sure that you have appropriate insurance for BASE. If you live in a country where social healthcare takes care of you, congratulations. Let sleeping dogs lie and consider yourself lucky. But please don't judge other countries; insurance (including the one your goverment supplies) has no emotion, and justly so.
The only reason that I can see for the media to have touted the guys as being "experienced" and hacing their gear along was to keep the fantasy that they may be alive, which kept the story alive. If they had said early on that these guys were toast ... no story, no hundreds(?) of dollars per second for the view of the chinook helicopter at the summit of Hood, etc. They didn't wish to get the story right, their desire was to have a dramatic story and the ratings that went with it, period. 