For-profit insurance has been painfully and obviously “very bad” since before I existed. No “actually” needed. This is common knowledge.
Now what are we going to do about it?
It’s useful to precise about exactly why it’s bad. The idea that capitalism breeds efficiency is baked into the American psyche at this point. But in this case it’s literally the opposite of the truth.
This isn’t like a highly trained transplant surgeon demanding a salary of 800k instead of 600k. No health care is delivered by an insurance company.
Every dollar earned in profit by a health insurance company is a dollar that was spent on health care for which no health care was delivered. They are literally just inefficiency in the system.
Being bad is one thing, but a lot of people say “Well of course people think it’s bad. It’s not handing out money to people willy-nilly, so people hate it”. Some people would rather have bad things that are efficient with money (because if you have a lot of money, you can solve the problem).
Being financially inefficient may get some people to look into it and change their tune.
Going from…
I spend more money and get what I want, poor people just need to work harder and be smarter with their money.
To…
Why am I paying more money for bureaucracy when I could be paying less money for less bureaucracy? I don’t care if more people get help…I just want to be paying less.
Of course, some people would rather pay more for more red tape because they really hate the idea of poorer people having access to the things they have. But some people are not that bad.
DUH
It’s not waste. It’s theft. From the point of view of the people doing the administrating, the money they’re taking out is a goal, not a wastefulness.
It’s the exact same thing the music industry does to artists, or the “defense” industry does to the taxpayers. It looks wasteful if you think of it as trying to accomplish some goal other than enriching the people doing it, but that is exactly the goal, so it’s working perfectly.
That waste how they extract profit.
The business model is to middle man every medical transaction and they take a cut on each one. And some transaction they can keep entire value bt denying a claim as a hail merry.
This shit is more parasitic than payments processing industry.
How did we end up where folk just accept either of these things?
These industries need to be dismantled. But it is probably easier for everybody to move to a country that actually has a functioning system lol
Although the darlings in the Nordics are starting to show cracks esp Sweden. The US style extraction systems are being exported and they able to impose them via decisive politics that working classes larp.
They must think they got some sort of cheat code.
Compare the health care spending per capita of industrialized countries:
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/
The US spends $12,555 per capita (per 2022). To bring us in line with other industrialized countries, we would need to cut that number in half.
Compare to the number cited in the article:
To get your head around why this is, think for a second about what happens to every $100 you give to a private insurance company. According to the most exhaustive study on this question in the U.S.—the CBO single-payer study from 2020—the first thing that happens is that $16 of those dollars are taken by the insurance company. From there, the insurer gives the remaining $84 to a hospital to reimburse them for services. That hospital then takes another $15.96 (19% of its revenue) for administration, meaning that only $68.04 of the original $100 actually goes to providing care.
In a single-payer system, the path of that $100 looks a lot different. Rather than take $16 for insurance administration, the public insurer would only take $1.60. And rather than take $15.96 of the remaining money for hospital administration, the hospital would only take $11.80 (12% of its revenue), meaning that $86.60 of the original $100 actually goes to providing care.
Administration overhead fixes wouldn’t quite get all of the difference, but it is a huge chunk of it. That on top of Medicare being able to negotiate better rates would likely do the rest.
So, yeah, do universal Medicare. That alone takes care of almost the entire problem.
