- the Affordable Care Act subsidizes American health insurance with tax payer funds by covering much of the cost of insurance
- Health insurance companies are required by law to spend 85% of that revenue on healthcare
- Health insurance companies, logically, acquire providers. Thus, the 85% of their spending on healthcare is just funneled into the other companies that they own
The system is currently the worst of both worlds. We have tax payer funds going straight to for-profit entities which have become vertically integrated throughout every aspect of the American healthcare system.
Within the context of the current system it’s still better than being denied insurance due to pre-existing conditions.
What the author ignores re: the shooting is that United Healthcare is particularly bad compared to other insurance companies. I’ve had multiple instances of them denying a first choice drug without explanation despite doctor’s write ups. Doctors are always on the edge and saying things like “if the insurance approves.”
What is the point of going to medical school/residency/fellowship/etc if at the end of the day the insurance is making medical decisions?
From the blog:
> If insurers were so good at extracting money from the system, why are they so unprofitable?
Maybe their unprofitability is driving them to find new ways to extract money?
For healthcare I don’t understand the need for profit except for the researchers and companies who directly had a role in discovering and manufacturing the product (and funding trials).
Why do we even need insurance companies if we actually trusted doctors to make the right decisions?
This article completely seems to miss the point. If your profits are capped by regulation, how can you increase them? Increase costs.
I don't know how you can write so many words about health insurance and not mention this even once, even concluding your post with "Why don't they have the same profit levels as the S&P?"
> If your profits are capped by regulation, how can you increase them? Increase costs.
Mentioned in the article:
> [Matt Bruening] also alleges that some of this “inefficiency” is actually intentional on the part of the insurers — a disguised way to pay themselves out.
> It's mostly the providers overcharging you, not the middlemen.
What kind of post is this. Kettle, pot, whatever. The numbers are good to see, but don't make it paint it better by pointing elsewhere. I once did consulting work for a US student loan company. The best thing they could say was that they weren't as bad as the worst student loan company.
I am not a lawyer, but my opinion is the people who hate on trial lawyers do so because they sue for astronomical amounts of money when the doctors fuck up and accidentally ruin peoples lives.
People who hate on "trial lawyers" driving up the cost of medical services in America should shut their traps because Doctors are not saints.
Do you think that the hospital who employed the Doctor who used his medical practice to enable him to molest young boys so horrifically that they gave him life in prison should not be at least somewhat responsible for the crimes he committed? Should they not provide oversight?
I'm sure those victims are going to get a lot of money, and it's going to come from the insurance that the hospital paid for to protect itself from these kinds of insane scenarios.
If it weren't for trial lawyers, victims would go on being victims, and it's not like the hospitals would charge less just because they didn't have high insurance premiums, they would just get to pocket more of the money themselves.
there are sooooo many great doctors and you picked a monster here to prove what point? that there are monsters in every profession? say I work at Microsoft and am also a monster and commit heinous crimes. say I bring my own device to work connected to Starlink and in my office while I am coding new awesome feature to “Co-Pilot for your DOS Prompt” I also sell snuff films and child pornography. Is Microsoft liable for this? Should
they hire a firm to go into each office and inspect everything there, go through every employee’s personal device to see what is on there and what whether they are involved in anything?
I am neither defending the hospital (who probably could have done more) and of course not the monster doctor but as with everything else in america everything is blank and white. one monster goes through high school and college and med school and residency and … undetected as being a monster and trial lawyer goes “hey why don’t we extract millions of dollars from the employer…”
That's just the most egregious one I've heard of recently. Look through court filings in any state and you'll find a laundry list of people who have real and valid claims against doctors for malpractice.
The list of preventable birth injuries, surgical mistakes, misdiagnoses, ignoring valid requests for treatment, and just straight up failing to do their basic duties as medical professionals would fill a quarterly encyclopedia in America alone.
go through the list in every state and find every success medical procedure by every doctor and then compare that to the number from your laundry list and see where that gets you.
so some doctors fuck up? sure they do, I am sure you fucked up at your job tens if not hudreds of times. the mate that posted original comment singled out a single doctor
who turned out to be a monster. using that kind of parody I can single out hundreds of good doctors across every state in the country.
would I sue someone for medical malpractice if I deemed I was a victim of it? absolutely! I am not saying you do not have a right to sue if you feel like you a victim of medical malpractice, I took an issue with original comment which singled out a specific monster who slipped through many cracks to end up at some random hospital who is now somehow at fault that he is deep down a monster
There's two sides to that. Police accidentally ruin lives most days and generally have a degree of immunity for example.
Arguably the needle has moved too far with doctors - they treat every medical note as a legal document, almost a mini contract carefully written and cautiously hedged. Imagine writing all your code and notion documentation very cautiously and legally carefully so as to leave no impression that you may have had fault, being ambiguous here and there and non-committal to not nothing. Unironically that is how it works fully in medicine in the present, and I feel that detracts from an ideal world where a doctor may express what they think straight up, clearly. If anyone is meant to read their notes it ought to be the patient, not the lawyer.
It doesn't serve much to point to platitudes and extremes one way or the other, let's look at the average case, the average case is the average doctor writes every note with fear and caution with regards to legalities and missteps.
- the Affordable Care Act subsidizes American health insurance with tax payer funds by covering much of the cost of insurance
- Health insurance companies are required by law to spend 85% of that revenue on healthcare
- Health insurance companies, logically, acquire providers. Thus, the 85% of their spending on healthcare is just funneled into the other companies that they own
The system is currently the worst of both worlds. We have tax payer funds going straight to for-profit entities which have become vertically integrated throughout every aspect of the American healthcare system.