I hope she’s criticizing for profit companies and not the concept of health insurence per se.
You give me money in exchange for a promise, and I won’t honor that promise when you ask for assistance.
Health insurance is 90% of the problem
Nah. Germany has health insurance and while it’s far from perfect, it’s on a different planet compared to US health insurance.
As others have said, we can look to other countries for examples of health insurance being done well. Insurance serves an important function for things that would otherwise create large debt unpredictably. It just doesn’t work well as a for-profit non-utility industry.
I would say the main issue for the US is the actual healthcare providers charging so much. Insurance companies do enable that in a sense by allowing people to get healthcare that otherwise would be unaffordable. Members are insulated from the cost and simply want their desired care approved, so hospitals take advantage of this by charging increasingly ludicrous amounts. And since at minimum 80% of health insurance premium revenue must go to paying member services, this means coverage costs inevitably spiral.
Insurance companies disappearing would eventually lead to lower prices since patients would no longer be able to afford healthcare, but that’s obviously not a good solution. Government regulating the price of healthcare more directly would allow insurance to be both cheaper and more optional.
No. France’s health insurance has many issues, but… I recently had to wait one whole month to get non-urgent jaw surgery at the top hospital in the country. Stayed for a week. It should cost me 50€ or so, including meds and post-op care.
Privatised healthcare providers are also an issue.
Or, if you want private capital involved on either side - overall de-/non-regulation is a major problem too.
There are so many instruments the govs could use but just don’t bcs monies.
Both are horrible to ever exist!
And for the same reason - it can never be a free market is demand and supply aren’t both free.
Wanting healthcare when in need isn’t really that much of a free choice (demand).
That means on supply side where everyone is motivated by profit you don’t need any sort of collusion for everyone to consistently pump up healthcare costs & healthcare insurance premiums, there just isn’t any downside.
Direct market competition is financially pointless so all you ever see is mergers.Oh - and comprehensive national healthcare has insurance built in naturally & efficiently bcs countries have millions of people that pay for healthcare (and no profit is privatised, even better, participants aren’t driven by profit).
In recent decades in Europe we underfunded national healthcare providers & are now slowly privatising it - costs are soaring (nothing compared to USA, but we know what’s happening, yet we don’t vote for it/representatives don’t act on it).
What’s the point of health insurance anyway?
They just charge exorbitant prices for basic BS. Single bandage at the hospital? $20 please JUST for the bandage, nothing yet for the nurse, no no that’s separate.
Meanwhile you could get 10 bandages at the local pharmacy for $5 and if you’re nice the clerk wraps it around your wound.
The only system that makes sense is a controlled state system like we have in the EU where the prices are strictly regulated.
Hell, even here the prices are high, but not THAT high.
They just charge exorbitant prices for basic BS. Single bandage at the hospital? $20 please JUST for the bandage, nothing yet for the nurse, no no that’s separate.
Technically, that’s the hospital extorting the insurance company, but it’s connected for sure.
If a licensed physician prescribes a procedure, insurance shouldn’t evaluate whether it’s needed. That’s it.
You are the product
You dead or without any money left, or both is the product.
… gatekeeping is whatthey get paid for.
Remember pryimid schemes are illegal. Because they dont sell a product.
They’re not illegal because they don’t sell a product, they’re illegal because they’re impossible to maintain mathematically.
It’s not far off from a Ponzi scheme, honestly. A few people are going to make a lot of money early on and everybody else is going to get rapidly diminishing returns to nothing.
It’s wild how much this contrasts with Australia’s Medicare, like here you can literally just walk into the ER with any issue, show them your Medicare card and get your entire treatment covered for free unless you need any private healthcare, which even then there are rebates and private healthcare competes with public so it’s also moderately affordable.
There were 2 instances where my dad needed to be in hospital for multiple days at a time, once for a broken wrist after slipping at the boat ramp after a fishing trip, and the other was a stingray attack on his leg at that same boat ramp. Both instances didn’t require a single cent exchanged, we just walked in and described the issue, and boom, after a few days he was treated to the extent he could go home and not really worry at all anymore.
Your dad should stay away from that boat ramp…
I vote it be burnt.
Boat Ramps are typically concrete. And partially submerged. Good luck!
Pocket linin’ gatekeepin’
The first step for you would be to understand what an insurance is about 😃
Have you noticed a weird pattern where in your country, with insurance, the prices for non-insured individuals are through the roof? Even simple medications or procedures are so expensive you’re almost guaranteed to suffer financially from any medical procedure. Ever noticed that?
The issue with a snarky “learn what insurance is about” is that insurance companies, especially in the US, especially within healthcare, figured out a loop by which they can increase the prices so absurdly high that you need insurance and even with insurance, you’re likely going to suffer. So yes, your simplistic logic of “you pay insurance an affordable amount per month now, so that if you need something expensive later they cover you” is fundamentally destroyed by the reality where insurance companies can determine the final price, and therefore, it shifts from actual insurance into mafia.
But maybe nuance is not the strong suit of the average US citizen, so I guess a one liner snarky reply is all your working memory can afford to think through.
Also, their argument could be destroyed be simply looking at other countries, like most european ones, where healtcare is paid by taxes so everyone get low-cost healthcare and if they really want private healtcare they can still pay a company
Health insurance in sane is fine though, so the thing in the screenshot is bollocks. That’s the point of the comment.
“it’s easier to fool someone than it is to convince him that he’s been fooled”
Bet that’s not as revealing as understanding what good healthcare without insurance is about.
Understanding what can & what can’t be a free market is a step before that first step tho.
Taking your premiums and finding ways to deny your claim.
Done, what’s next?
Person: here’s some money
Company: oh cool thanks
Person: ok now give it back
Company: yeah about that
Insurance is a company that takes small amounts of money monthly in the event of a large expense that you are unable to pay for. Then they don’t give you all the money to cover the expense. -At least not without a fight. They take ~7% of your money for this service.
An insurance organization operated for the benefit of the insured gives value. An insurance organization run for the benefit of investors gives the barest minimum (or less) to the insured and takes lives in the name of profits.
It would make sense if health insurance just covered hospitalizations, catastrophic diseases, etc. But it’s required for any healthcare to be affordable and healthcare is a necessity.
Its like a subscription model, but worse because you don’t actually know what will be included (covered) or denied.
Imagine if 90% of the time, Spotify would only play an album if you asked to play it twice, unless it was an album in the billboard top ten, and sometimes it would decide to not play an album at all, and it had made deals with every record company that made physical media versions of albums cost $5,000. That’s what health insurance is like.
the first step for you would be shutting up and having your first neuron activation at last
Lmfao, it’s nerdy as hell but hilarious
lmao cnews mentioned. i feel this paper isnt based on a lot of evidence rather than vibe and wishfull thinking
I think you might be in the wrong thread with this comment.
thanks, didnt know how this happen.
it would be known as usury in an earlier period, say, 13th century Italy
You are too weak, cowardly and divided to stop it. That’s why. Organize, grow a pair and empower each other. You must fight as a group or you will continue to be oppressed and exploited.
and manipulated to fight against each other, against your own interests
waiting for a medical group to bypass them and collect premiums directly. if only to end insurance paperwork costs. it is a drag on everyone’s bottom line. aside from price distortions.
I’ve seen it with dentists, they have a membership plan that covers cleanings and certain things which can be useful and affordable if you don’t have access to affordable dental insurance.
A couple of my doctors did that before I left the US in 2021. They stopped accepting insurance and started charging a monthly “membership fee” that would cover a certain number of visits per year.
My parents are part of a clinic exactly like this. I legit thought it might be a scam at first because “how have insurance companies not shut this down?”
Horrible place for a conflict of interest
conflict with insurance interest in taking your money. nurse i know spends 2 hours of insurance documentation for every hour on actual nursing.
I’m not claiming that’s a good thing but I’m fine with my medical provider being incented to provide proper care and to get everything they deserve from my insurance. I would not be fine with them being incented to provide only the care I can afford right now or being incented to maximize how much I’m stuck paying
It sorta works for kaiser - they administer the insurance and the hospitals. Very convenient for people who both have the insurance and access to their facilities.
Nowhere near as good as a single payer system of course.
I don’t love Kaiser - the prices still suck. But they sometimes suck less, and their system is far more streamlined than I’ve had with other insurance providers. Still ridiculous to be trapped in a system with no control over or transparency into costs.
It would convert nicely enough to a single payer. Granted costs might suck but if they were just absorbed into the system, I wouldn’t really care. I could at least believe they are trying to be efficient. As it is, I’m left believing I get charged as much as they think they can get away with. And wth else am I going to do? Kaiser is much cheaper than my employer’s other option (there are literally 2), and I’ve had the other before. It just sucks (slightly) differently.
When the US was having actual discussions of single-payer health care (i.e. the “public option” during Obama’s first term), one major argument against it was “do you really want the government between you and your doctor?!”
Even though insurance companies are literally already between you and your doctor, and they exist purely to extract money from that interaction.
It’s never made sense.
I don’t want anyone between me and my doctor. Doctors should be deciding what care I require and billing the govt for it. If the government thinks something fishy is going on, they can audit them after the fact. I need not be involved. As it stands I don’t go to the doctor at all because I’m worried they’ll do some test or something that wasn’t actually approved by my insurance and I’ll get slapped with a bill for 1000s of dollars.
Just as an aside, often the bill you first receive from stuff like that is the fake price they bill insurance for, so the insurance company can “negotiate” a better deal.
If you get a bill like this and insurance denies the claim, you can often call the billing department and get a significant reduction.
I knew someone who racked up like $250k in denied claims from cancer treatment. They went to the hospital to work out a payment plan, and the billing department was so surprised someone actually wanted to pay their bill they dropped it to $2500.
Obviously it’s still fucked that you have to do it, but the price can often be lower than the sticker price.
You can also call your doctor to ask what tests they’re going to run and which lab they use, then call your insurance to verify coverage. Or if the testing is done in house the office staff can check for you.
The old arguments were “Look how long they (the socialists) wait to get appointments and get seen!” Yep, we’re there now. I have insurance, I still pay a bunch, and seeing specialists is a luxury at this point. If I have an issue, I don’t even consider calling specialists, because I know it’s weeks til I can get in.
Weeks lol, try months to years round these parts
And then the same party decided to get the government in there too anyways
Ahaha that’s a good point. Tbh despite the nickname “Obamacare” it had slipped my mind that the ACA was the bastardized, castrated version of that whole thing.
They chopped it down to Romneycare
during Obama’s first term
Lol this was just about the first thing Clinton tried to get done in 1993. It’s one of the things that led to the creation of Fox News.
You forgot that Clinton tried as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_1993
I don’t trust the government, but I trust them a hell of a lot more than insurance companies of all people
Capitalism is basically about making as much money as possible with as few products/services as possible. Health insurance is one of the best ways to achieve that.
You forgot the most important part of capitalism which is exploiting labor.
It probably started with healthcare being expensive.
Insurance is why it got expensive
Let me state up front I agree with you. A less charitable reading of what I’m about to say would try to make it seem like I’m putting the blame on other things to deflect. I’m not. Insurance companies fucking suck and are among the reasons it’s expensive.
Like everything it’s more complicated than a single factor. Tying healthcare to jobs is part of it. Boosting the number of people signing up for the military is part of it for both VA insurance and college. The cost of college (with its financial middlemen as well) for doctors is part of it.
Insurance is a huge reason. There are a hundred other little reasons as well, many of them also dealing with financial middlemen, that contribute to the issue. It’s a Gordian Knot of idiocy and when it gets sliced it’s going to be painful and, once the initial pain is done, necessary in hindsight.
An under-appreciated aspect of the insurance industry is the fact that there is typically a multi-year lag between the collection of premiums and the payout of claims. Insurance companies invest the premiums in the meantime and profit off the returns. This allows them (in some cases) to be profitable even when payouts exceed premiums. As a result, not only are health insurers not troubled by rising costs, they actually benefit from rising costs because the premiums rise at the same time.
That’s not entirely true. I mean, they’re one of the biggest parts of the problem.
I mean look at a new MRI machine at around 3 million. There is a point where such tech didn’t even exist.
It is the reason why healthcare is up to three times more expensive in the US compared to countries with universal healthcare.
They also have MRI machines in countries with universal healthcare, so that is a completely moot point.
Special thanks to the people who made MRI exist! It’s a good thing they can each scan tens of thousands of people.
It started with emergency life-saving healthcare being expensive.
If cancer treatments are costly, then insurance is useful to spread the risk among a large group of people - you know, the way other forms of insurance work. You pay some small amount a month, and if you get sick/injured in a way that is expensive to treat, you don’t suddenly get saddled with backbreaking debt because that pooled money goes towards the treatment.
But then employers started offering insurance as a benefit to entice workers. These insurance plans started to offer more and more, including reducing the cost of a regular doctor’s visit. In order to take advantage of this, doctors started charging more money so that they could get more of that insurance money - and the customer wouldn’t see the price increase, because the insurance company was covering the difference.
Insurance, already important to avoid getting saddled with medical debt, became virtually ubiquitous - and so did the increased prices to capture the maximum payout from the insurance companies. This resulted in the stupid prices for every little thing at a hospital; insurance companies negotiate specific prices for specific things, but different insurance companies have different negotiated prices, so the doctors and hospitals have some ridiculously high price to make sure they get the maximum possible from every insurance company.
If you don’t have insurance, you can often negotiate the price down yourself - but the hospitals don’t want you to. They want you to pay the ridiculous price because it means they get more money… so they don’t tell you that they have mechanisms in place for uninsured patients to negotiate the price down. Which results in the thousand-plus-dollar bills you see every time you have to go to the ER.
You are the product. When your liability outpaces your premium is when they decide to stop covering you.
