These days, health insurance is so expensive that you almost have to take out a loan to pay for it. Even if your employer pays half or more of your premium, a family's premium is still at least $200 to $300 a month. This is ridiculous, especially for people who don't go to the doctor very often. But everyone is afraid that if they don't have health insurance and they get sick, they won't be able to get the help they need or they'll get care that isn't as good because they don't have insurance. Health insurance costs keep going up because of many things that have come up over time.
The number of frivolous malpractice lawsuits filed against doctors every year is one of the main reasons why health insurance costs keep going up. Even if a doctor did nothing wrong, they still have to pay the court costs, which are usually covered by their malpractice insurance. If a doctor makes a mistake, they can be sued for tens of millions of dollars. All of this means that doctors have to pay more for malpractice insurance, which means that their patients have to pay more so that they can stay in business. One of the best ideas I've heard to help solve this problem is for the government to limit the amount of money that can be given as "punitive damages" in lawsuits. Anything over the limit will be given to the state to help pay for schools, roads, and other things for the community. This will make it harder for people to sue just to get rich quickly, but people will still be able to sue if they have been wronged.
The fact that health insurance companies can get out of paying the full amount a doctor asks for is another big problem that causes problems with health insurance. Health insurance companies don't usually pay half of what a doctor's office asks for, so the office usually has to pay for the costs it didn't get reimbursed for. This means that doctor's offices have to raise their prices to make up for the lost money. A simple way to solve this problem would be to make rules that let doctors' offices charge the full amount for a visit. With these rules, health insurance companies would have to pay what doctors charge, which would bring down the cost of doctor visits for everyone.
