Insuring the Chosen Few

THEY HAVE ADVERTISED on radio, a group called "share care", approximately one hundred thousand Christians paying for each other's health insurance, like a voluntary religious HMO or grass roots insurance risk pool. This is a group of ordinary private citizens, providing their own health insurance collectively, cooperatively, without any corporations or corporate profit. Sounds great. How does one sign up? Whether they take in people with less than perfect health, or non Christians, is uncertain. With only a hundred thousand member risk pool, they'd all better be pretty healthy, or we're talking about some very high benefit pay outs, and thus very high premiums. The fact that they advertise means they want more members, as does any risk pool. Hell, why not just make it simple, and include all seven point three billions of us? Health insurance only for the elite, chosen Christian few? Perhaps they are all politically conservative as well. Just a guess. Presumably, when the rapture occurs, anyone who is left behind, if anyone is, will simply have to find another health insurance provider. The problem with free market health insurance in America is that, with recent corporate mergers, there are only now about three companies which provide it, which leads one to believe that the level of real competition is the field is strictly limited, unacceptably limited, just as every major industry in America is a virtual monopoly. But if there are enough providers to generate competition, say, more than three, maybe even a double digit number of them, down go the risk pools in numbers and up go the premiums, and that isn't good either. That is the catch 22 which all free market competitive insurance faces, in America or anywhere. If you have enough competing/providers to foster vigorous competition, you have too many small risk pools to maintain sufficient funding. It could be argued that insurance, like police and fire protection or highway construction and maintenance, is best offered collectively, cooperatively, (dare we say "socialistically"), and works best when it includes us all, not just the chosen few.