Insurance is what makes U.S. health-care prices so high
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/26/health-care-insurance-prices-patients/
Insurance is what makes U.S. health-care prices so high
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/26/health-care-insurance-prices-patients/
37 comments
And water is what makes things so wet.
And it’s only going to get more expensive when Trump and Co. have their way. People will be begging to be on their current insurance plan because I’m sure millions will be losing coverage left and right when they cut protections for people with pre-existing conditions, put caps on care and get rid of program such as Medicare and Medicaid.
“They want you to think that corporations. are more efficient than the government, right?
You want to know why the health care industry is the most profitable business in the Unites States?
‘Cause the insurance companies take 24 cents out of every dollar that’s spent.
You know what it takes the government to do the same thing for Medicare?
Three cents out of every dollar.
Now, what is all this crap they hand you about business being more efficient?
These guys need to be regulated.
You think these pigs are gonna regulate themselves?”
And determining our care vs a doctor
Try to think of it as a jobs program. /s
Profit based capitalistic health was started by Nixon in the 60s. Maybe that?
Of course it does. It a third, fourth and fifth party, just adds layers and layers of bureaucracy, and every layer needs to get paid.
Ask yourself has insurance ever;
Made care more affordable/cheaper?
More available?
Lowered cost of any part of medicine?
Improved the quality of care?
Basic scam line of insurance industry is that “ if we all sign up we will share the cost, and therefor our cost will go down” yet 20+ more million people signed up under Obama care and all of our prices went up!
Insurance may work with car or house insurance, as most of us may never make a claim. Health insurance all of us will need care at some point.
Everyone it is a scam, designed to funnel your money/ generational wealth to very few and make them very wealthy. It does not and has not helped you to receive better medicine or care.
Yes I know that there will be stories of I could have never afforded my medicine without my insurance, but that just brings us back to the very first point. The cost of medicine has risen due to insurance companies/scammers.
Universal health care now! It won’t be perfect, it will have its own flaws. But we can look around to every other modern nation, and learn what works and what doesn’t and design a system based of if this. Universal care is very different in different countries from Japan, Germany, France, England, Canada. We can do better. We just need our politicians Left and Right to work for the better of the people not for their own wealth/re-election.
No shite Sherlock.
Insurance companies *are incentivised to raise costs as high as they can*.
The [80/20 rule in the ACA](https://www.healthcare.gov/health-care-law-protections/rate-review/) places a legal requirement that they:
>spend at least 80% of the money they take in from premiums on health care costs and quality improvement activities. The other 20% can go to administrative, overhead, and marketing costs.
And profits, even if the ACA website glosses over that part a bit.
And how do you make the real value of that 20% go up? Well, maybe you can optimize your way to some marginal improvements on the overhead portion, but wouldn’t it be so much easier to just make the pie bigger?
Costs go up, premiums go up, and the value of their 20% goes up.
And the people go bankrupt, suffer, and die.
It’s not insurance exactly…it’s the extortion of consumers BY the insurance companies simply to make money that is the real issue
Solution: Get rid of insurance. Get rid of for-profit hospitals.
The CEO needs that shiny mega yacht. You just don’t understand
It certainly isn’t physician fees.
Restricting access, forcing people to use a middleman. That’s America.
It’s a middleman
Duh…..
America’s healthcare system is a ducking joke unless you have a lot of money. The rest of the modern world has figured out universal healthcare and while some scream, “but in wherever they have to…” and it’s some kind of “ism.” You mean the rest of the modern world with better outcomes at a lower cost.
American health insurance pretty much started in WWII as a way to attract workers when there was an extreme shortage of workers and has been tied to employment ever since. We’ve reached the point where some folks are so darned worried that someone will get something for “free” they’ll gladly pay more to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Years back I had a test where the provider accepted *10 cents on the dollar* as payment in *full*. Yup, $100 test that the insurance company paid the provider $10. If I had gone in without insurance the provider would have wanted $100. How the duck is that not fraud, name any other place in the world where you get a 90% discount.
For anyone who doesn’t agree with me, remember that a healthy workforce is a productive workforce.
“So just let Amazon handle it” – the Washington Post
Anyone surprised? Nah? Me either.
Duh. Profit it what does it
You don’t say
I don’t understand how we pay do much for ins but then get nickled & dimed for co pays, deductibles, etc.
Duh. It’s also what makes our outcomes so horseshit.
No shit.
Time to end the current US “healthcare” for profit system and convert to socialized healthcare
That’s news?!
You mean that a group of people who siphon off billions without contributing a single fucking thing, make the cost higher?? Whoah my head hurts.
It’s not just insurance. In my area, all of the private doctors have been bought out by hospitals except the doctor I see. The charge to see a primary care doctor is about the same across the board, but when you see a hospital employed one, there’s an additional $200 dollar charge. And the hospitals now have very few primary doctors, with many of their locations staffed solely by PAs. You don’t pay any less to see a PA or a nurse. So they save a lot not paying doctors salaries, but not one penny of that goes to the patient.
This is such an easy thing to explain. Insurance is premium – claims – costs = profit. All of these companies make a ton of money. Without the profit, the costs are lowered because there is no greedy corporate shareholder, it’s just about care.
Sure it has to be run well, but tax revenue – healthcare costs with a goal of net $0 results in much lower costs, all else being equal.
Modern day health insurance isn’t insurance at all. Its a discount card for medical services. And Americans want choice. Health care systems in other developed countries work differently because they restrict choice in exchange for providing some form of universal coverage.
We cannot have both. Either you get choice with our current US system, or you get something else that might be like Medicare for All but with a supply-side set of restrictions that would reduce our choices.
If you want to learn more about this, please lookup and listen to Peter Attia’s conversation with Saum Sutaria on Attia’s “The Drive” podcast. Fascinating and informative with some great historical perspectives on how Medicare and Medicaid came to be and why we find ourselves where we are today.
…and in other news, water is wet.
Shouldn’t this be in R/No-Duh.
This is not even capitalism any more because there is no really market place. There is no real market place for insurance because most of us get it through our employers and thus have little say in what insurance companies we are with .
There is also no market place in healthcare because insurance companies control access to the patients. So doctors have to agree to their terms in order to even get access to patients. It doesn’t matter the quality of care you provide, all that matters is what network you are listed in. This has lead doctors to become employed or form big groups to get better contracts but even then, it doesn’t matter if you are a good doctor or not, all that matter is what network you get listed in. This means insurance companies can extort more and more for themselves because they control access to the patients.
How do we fixt this with out Medicare for all: Get rid of the tax incentives for employer based healthcare and let the free market actually work. Let people be able to have a public option along with private options to decide which doctors and services work best for them.
I think the the problem is the companies providing the services and the companies who collect the insurance fees are all owned by the same people. This is a clear definition of cartel or monopoly. There is no free-market to wring out the inefficiencies that are causing the gouging and fleecing of the American people.
“We need a marketplace for healthcare!” says CEO of a marketplace for healthcare.
News at 11.
No shit.
They exist only to draw as much profit from the health care system, their 1 goal is to have us pay as much as possible while getting as little care as possible
Hospitals/care providers point at the insurance folk , the care providers/hospitals point at the insurance. Truth is both are making bank, insurance companies more so right now.
Comments are closed.