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imagine life if the people in power were engineers rather than lawyers
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
Look at finance! They don’t make anything of actual value, they just bet what’s going to happen to the people that do
If they did that, then they’d be contributing useful information about which ideas are good. But they don’t even do that anymore; the finance game has been rigged since the bailouts started.
Health insurers don’t contribute information. You don’t need to know what your odds of getting sick are because you’re going to want treatment either way. A choice where the alternative is death isn’t a choice.
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.
ah that western bias again…
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.
This is unironically Nixon’s fault.
It’s also unironically Reagan’s fault, as well as both Clinton and FDR.
Prior to FDR doctors and healthcare were run completely not for profit, and part of The New Deal included privatizing hospitals. Nixon did insurance. Reagan and Clinton mostly just took the government further out of healthcare by removing regulations.
Can you point me in a direction for a source of the new deal hospital privatization aspect please?
I’m unfamiliar and want to lean more.
Looking into it, it seems to have been Truman, not FDR, though FDR may have helped create the bill. You’re looking for the healthcare reform act of 1945. I just remember my nurse grandmother going on multiple tirades about the privatization of healthcare starting around then, and healthcare in general being slowly suffocated by admins ever since. She didn’t live long enough to give me her opinions on the ACA.
Thanks. Yeah, I didn’t want to come off as a know it all umm actually guy so I figured I could be wrong and just ask for a source.
I had done my own search too but again, everyone is fallible so better to just ask.
Also I know it means nothing from some rando on the interwebs but good on ya for correcting yourself. In today’s age and all that…hope you’re as well as you can be. Take care! (Goes to look further into Truman’s war criminal ass lol)
Edit: it appears Truman actually tried to make a national health insurance act happen and was defeated by anti-communist sentiments, the American Medical Association, and republicans fear mongering and “they’re gonna raise your taxes!!!” rhetoric. It would have been a part of the social security expansion but alas, congress is corrupt and Americans are gullible (being generous).
Private nonprofit hospitals aren’t even that bad. Its private insurance thats the real problem
The US should adopt the Dutch healthcare system. You could have medical treatment as an average Joe and also not be bankrupt or up to your tits in debt.
yeah, but, like the lines are long
/s
I’m still rooting for Danish healthcare! I don’t know anything about it, nor do I live in California but I’d welcome our new overlords
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…
Please don‘t extrapolate from the US healthcare system to insurances in general. Insurances collect money from many so in the case something happens to an individual that individual doesn‘t need take the full financial loss. This makes a lot of sense, because it would very inefficient if everyone would save money in order to pay for a potential cancer treatment. Cancer is rare, but in aggregate it is just small amount each month.
The job of the insurance is to define that monthly amount (which is not trivial to do), collect it, store it and eventually pay it out.
On another note, unless an insurance is mandatory you can usually opt to pay yourself.
Anything critical to the life of an individual citizen, like health and home insurance, should be publicly run. It just doesn’t make sense for a private company to manage that because their profit motive is in direct opposition to the individual (i.e. they must fight claims and inflate premiums to increase revenue).
The state loses money anyway if the person is homeless or destitute so they might as well pay out. Yes there are still agents to manage funds and adjust claims and set rates but they’re now operating as impartial public servants instead of antagonists.
You would think that. But most decent sized companies self insure. That means they figure out how much to hold in savings to cover potential costs. They probably pay someone for that number. The premium is just to pay the insurance company to manage billing. It is basically an administrative fee. That puts them in the position that employers will choose the insurance company that cost them the least, mainly by denying claims. It’s a system designed to extract as much money as possible from the people and pass it on to the largest shareholders (the board of directors).
It’s all a scam and if it doesn’t feel like that yet just you wait!
I just bought a new car. Been driving over twenty years, not a single accident or ticket ever in my life. It was a fucking Toyota Corolla. THEY TRIED TO CHARGE ME MORE A MONTH FOR INSURANCE THAN THE FUCKING CAR PAYMENT!
I was on the phone and I said to geico, you think you deserve a car and a half every fucking month to insure my one car? They told me I would never find a lower rapt that’s what everyone is going to be paying soon.
I found a lower rate… like 10% of what they quoted. Fucking con artists. Every single person that works in insurance should know they are the enemy.
I‘ve heard that car insurance is too expensive in the US, but keep in mind that you are usually not insuring your own car, but everyone else‘s, so if you are causing an accidents the other party can buy a new car for example. An old car (due to the lack of safety systems) is often more likely to end up in car crash than a newer one. In Germany (where insurance prices are much saner) this applies as well. You either get an expensive car and pay less for insurance or an old one and pay more. Also in Germany fees are pooled by model, so if your car is used by a lot young people (who get into accidents more) you also pay more. The good thing is that you can inform yourself about it before you buy a car to factor it into a buying decision from the start.
Sounds like communism to me, son.
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.
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?”
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.
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
the calculation i try to do. total insurance payments for a year minus healthcare received equals profits wasted building bigger office buildings and yachts for insurance execs. i’ll bet you a hundred dollars a month your house won’t burn down. or the extended car warranty scams are also same deal. house always wins because people don’t have common sense to save money for ‘rainy days’. schools don’t teach basic finance.
You are the product. When your liability outpaces your premium is when they decide to stop covering you.
Here in Argentina that we have free healthcare, insurance is a signal of wealth so you get attended in the private hospital away from the common folk. And even in the private hospital everything is relatively cheap because they have to compete with the free option.
Yeah, I wish health insurance was just “you’ll never pay more than 20k a year on medical bills” or something like that. Let me find my own damn doctor
Pretty much every plan has an annual out of pocket max, and in order to be listed on an exchange it has to be under $9,200 for an individual or $18,400 for a family. Balance billing is also now illegal, so whatever the insurance won’t pay can’t be billed to you. That’s the bare minimum, and it’s already the law.
So if you can find a plan that will cover any doctor you find (even if “out of network”), you can have what you’re looking for. It probably won’t be cheap, but what you’re asking for is in most plans in some way or another.
They do, but of course it depends on your company offering it.
The combination of “high deductible health plan” (cover everything after $x,000) and a “health savings account” (set aside pretax money, accumulate and invest) really seem like a solid improvement over everything else. If your company offers it. If you can afford to keep at least the full annual deduction in an HSA
That being said I’ve never been able to take advantage so I could easily be wrong. I currently pay for “old fashioned insurance” which really is the way your parents remember it,covers everything, low deductible and copay no out of network nonsense, but oh so expensive. Y’all with crappy insurance can at least applaud not paying premiums I’m stuck with
If you have good insurance, this is absolutely what it can be. My work pays for mine, and the max out-of-pocket is $3.6k/yr. I had already hit my max, then wound up with a $4k ER visit, so it wound up being free. Unfortunately, most insurance is fucking awful unless your company is willing to pay a shitton for some very expensive plan.
it would be known as usury in an earlier period, say, 13th century Italy
iirc, usery is a sin. says so in the manual
