astronomy

Health insurance cooperative

Health insurance cooperative is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Health insurance cooperative rather than just read about it. In short: A health insurance cooperative is a cooperative entity that has the goal of providing health insurance and is also owned by the people that the organization insures. It is a form of mutual insurance.

Key takeaways

Health insurance cooperative belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Health insurance cooperative to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Health insurance cooperative from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

A health insurance cooperative is a cooperative entity that has the goal of providing health insurance and is also owned by the people that the organization insures. It is a form of mutual insurance.

United States

In the debate over healthcare reform, healthcare cooperatives are posited as an alternative to both publicly funded healthcare and single-payer healthcare. Cooperatives had been proposed as part of the healthcare reform debate in the United States by the Barack Obama administration as a possible compromise with Blue Dog Democrats (as well as with Republicans) in the search for universal healthcare in the United States. As proposed by President Obama and others, a future health insurance cooperative would not be government owned or run, but would instead receive an initial government investment and would then be operated as a non-profit organization. While a health insurance co-op is not strictly run by the government, hence not making it a public entity, it has been described by former Senator Max Baucus of Montana, who was the chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Finance until his retirement from the Senate in 2014, as "tough enough to keep insurance companies’ feet to the fire." He proposed a bill that includes a health insurance cooperative instead of the public option. There once were numerous rural health cooperatives established by the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Most of them closed or merged over the years, generally because they lacked a sufficient economy of scale (i.e., they were too small to function efficiently). Thus, co-operatives currently have so little market share as to be "invisible". The bill proposed by Max Baucus, the America's Healthy Future Act, which uses health insurance cooperatives, was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost $829 billion over ten years, and because of the increase in taxes of $210 billion over 10 years on premium insurance plans with high benefits, would lead to a reduction in the deficit of $81 billion. It would expand coverage to 94 percent of all eligible Americans.

Support During a September 2009 report by John King of CNN, he stated that "supporters know, here in Minnesota and other farm states think co-ops could solve at least a big chunk of the healthcare access and affordability problem." He interviewed Bill Oemichen, President of the Cooperative Network, who remarked that "where co-ops are, they tend to be very, very high quality because it is the consumer who owns them, that is making sure that their health care provider is a quality health care provider." Oemichen also stated that 65% of those who switched from typical health insurance reported better coverage and service. In June 2009, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley told reporters, "if it’s all done entirely within the private sector, you know, it doesn’t seem to me it’s got the faults that you have... by having the government institute something." Steven Hill, a program director at the New America Foundation, has written for Salon.com that "co-ops may hold the key to a substantive compromise", comparing the U.S. reform proposals with health care in Germany. He argued that they can produce quality care for less money given that they would lack the profit motive, they would negotiate fees for service, and that they would end current market monopolies that insurance companies have in several states.

Criticism Howard Dean and other Democrats have criticized abandoning the idea of a federally run, statewide, public option in favor of co-ops, questioning whether the co-ops would have enough negotiating power to compete with private health insurers. The activist groups SEIU and MoveOn.org have also stated their opposition. 2008 Nobel Economics Laureate Paul Krugman and political commentator Robert Reich have also questioned co-ops' ability to become large enough to reduce health care costs significantly. Thus, they both support the public option instead, which has strong opposition from the insurance industry.

Examples Kentucky Health Cooperative (in Liquidation) Evergreen Health Cooperative (in Liquidation) Consumers Mutual Health Insurance of Michigan (This website is temporarily unavailable, please try again later.) Health Republic Insurance - New York, New Jersey, Oregon Archived 2014-01-09 at the Wayback Machine Nevada Health CO-OP - Nevada (in Liquidation) Ithaca Health Alliance Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative

See also Housing cooperative Health Insurance Innovations

References

External links Looking At Health Care Co-ops at Planet Money. Health Democracy: How to Liberate Americans from Medical Insurers (book).

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Health insurance cooperative

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Health insurance cooperative claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Health insurance cooperative before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Health insurance cooperative ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Health insurance cooperative

In research: Health insurance cooperative appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Health insurance cooperative in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Health insurance cooperative is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Cooperatives in the United States, Health care reform, Health education, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Health insurance cooperative outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Ask Teacher Smith questions about this articleOpens your AI tutor with a question about “Health insurance cooperative” →

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study Health insurance cooperative in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Health insurance cooperative means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Health insurance cooperative out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Health insurance cooperative in simple terms?

A health insurance cooperative is a cooperative entity that has the goal of providing health insurance and is also owned by the people that the organization insures. It is a form of mutual insurance.

Why does Health insurance cooperative matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Health insurance cooperative?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Health insurance cooperative.