i have a friend who’s a transplant patient and has been taking the same meds for over 10 years post transplant-- every year it’s a furious battle with insurance who, every year, decides the meds are no longer “medically necessary” and drops coverage for it. fucking helloooo these are anti-rejection pills, the textbook definition of “medically necessary.”
it’s not that insurance companies are stupid, it’s that they’re saving money on people dying when those people don’t get what they needed to live.
insurance is the biggest fucking scam of all time
The insurance system does not work in the medical field, it would never work because insurance is for managing risks that are unknown, like a house flooding or your car getting hit in an intersection.
In medical “insurance” it is often dealing with known issues, and the insurance system is just not set up to deal with preventative care, annual check ups, mammograms, blood tests, or pre-existing conditions. It would be like trying to use car insurance to pay for an oil change, which is just as ridiculous as it sounds in your head.
That’s exactly why the term “insurance” should be used when discussing a single payer system, it’s not really insurance, it should be a collective action group that works together with the medical community to find a middle ground where hospitals can still exist and pay wages to their staff, the people can get the medical care they need without getting thrown into poverty for daring to get sick, and the government benefits from having a healthier population as a whole.
Too bad theres way too much money in the short term in keeping this all private, and having a sicker population, so we have decades of insurance company propaganda to work against, and a huge population of people that don’t understand that by doing single payer health care your taxes would go up, but you also wouldn’t be paying out the nose for medical insurance & medical care (because they don’t cover anything). Also think of a world where your health care isn’t beholden to your employment, all the different choices you’d make in your life.
I have a chronic condition that requires expensive medication. Every. Single. Year. I have to fight insurance to renew the prescription. I went without for months the first time and ended up needing a far more expensive surgery to fix the damage it caused. I was already pretty left-leaning before my diagnosis, but now I don’t believe there is any justification for private anything in healthcare. It’s a completely morally bankrupt business to be making money off of people’s unavoidable suffering.
