151–160 of 377 posts
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This isn’t true at all. Insurance is heavily regulated. If you can’t resolve an issue with your insurance, most states have arbitration committee that will smack down insurance companies pretty quickly.
Lolwat the entire purpose of Arbitration is to give a massive advantage to corporations.
It’s not forced arbitration at all. You can still sue them.
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> Health insurance companies' profit margins are restricted by law, whereas Robert Wood Johnson and its executives and doctors profit margins are not restricted. If anyone is on the patient's side from a cost perspective, it's insurance, and the ones benefiting from higher pricing and unnecessary procedures are the providers. Untrue, because health insurers profits are limited by law, sure, but to a specified fractio…
How does that make it untrue? Health insurance companies are supposed to compete with each other based on their premium prices, and the insurance companies with lower premiums (and hence lower costs) will win more customers.
It's not a market with particularly robust competition, due to small number of players, and barriers to entry, both natural (two-sided network effects, practical capital requirements) and regulatory.
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How does that make it untrue? Health insurance companies are supposed to compete with each other based on their premium prices, and the insurance companies with lower premiums (and hence lower costs) will win more customers.
Except the insurance market doesn't work like that. You get a job, that job determines your insurance. There's no shopping around for the best rates.
That's not really the source of the lack of competition, as employers are motivated to minimize rates for what they ger, whether they are seeking to fulfill a government minimum-coverage mandate or provide a competitive benefit to attract/retain staff.
(It is a source of some other problems, just not the one at issue.)
Looking at the bill, here is some ridiculous: NaCl (basically salted water) costing around $300/liter. That's outrageous. These guys are protected by your politicians and make use of mercenary tactics. Villains in doctors clothing. I'm for free markets but we are kinda going over the limit here. Maybe have fixed rates for emergency where you can't get the approval of the patient. Maybe give the patient the possibilit…
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Health insurance companies' profit margins are restricted by law, whereas Robert Wood Johnson and its executives and doctors profit margins are not restricted. If anyone is on the patient's side from a cost perspective, it's insurance, and the ones benefiting from higher pricing and unnecessary procedures are the providers.
I've suddenly started seeing this take all over the place and I have no idea where it comes from because it doesn't make sense. That the insurance companies profit margins are restricted means rather little because executive pay isn't capped: if they earn too much money, they can simply pay bonuses to raise their expenses. Or cut shareholders a check. Or. Or. Or. Tangentially, this is why "non-profit" doesn't mean wh…
This is not correct, as I understand it. Under the ACA (Obamacare), health plan providers had to ensure that at least 80% of premiums were paid out for patient services. That leaves 20% for overheard, including profit and compensation.
The "trick" here is that service providers (doctors, hospitals, MRI facilities, labs, etc.) are not limited in this way (except by "usual and customary" terms where applicable), and there are LOTS of layers of providers. So in the end you can get many multiples of actual costs by simply washing the underlying treatment or service through 5 or so layers of providers.
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I don't think this follows. Insurance profit margins are restricted, but they're a percentage of overall payments to hospitals. If the total charge goes up, their total profit also increases.
Insurance companies are required to pay out 80%/85% of the collected premiums on medical care. Which means the remaining 20%/15% has to cover all the insurance company costs and any profit they can manage. If premiums are raised then their portion also will increase as a percentage. But if the medical costs increase without a corresponding premium increase, the insurance company won't see any profits.
That almost never happens.
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> Why the fuck isn't there a law against this kind of shit? There's a pretty clear answer to this question almost every single time it's asked... the people who benefit are wealthy and the people hurt are poor. The latter structurally lack the ability to fight it or lobby their congresspeople to change the law to help them. Until a mass movement steps forward to say "no, we will not tolerate this", nothing can possib…
Based on voting demographics, the poorest are the ones who are voting for politicians who hate the government and are opposed to any kind of subsidized healthcare.
And it's not necessarily true among those who do vote either:
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/bubba-isnt-who-...
It's an old article and I don't doubt that 2016 has messed with the numbers, but the narrative of poor rednecks screwing themselves over every election is largely unfounded and smacks of classism.
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That probably rules out every state and federal politician. Either way, this was on the hospital. Insurance paid $50k for an operation that costs $25k, and still the hospital charged him $109k. >UPDATE: Monday, shortly after publication and broadcast of this story by Kaiser Health News and NPR, St. David’s said it was now willing to accept $782.29 to resolve the $108,951 balance because Drew Calver qualifies for its…
> That probably rules out every state and federal politician. That sounds absolutely dystopian. A politician running on a platform to reform healthcare can’t possibly be bribed by the companies that would die in the process.
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Except the insurance market doesn't work like that. You get a job, that job determines your insurance. There's no shopping around for the best rates.
That's because the government allowed tax exempt employer funded health insurance to stick around. If everyone was forced onto healthcare.gov then it could be possible. Employers would have one less thing to deal with that has nothing to do with their product and taxpayers wouldn't have to worry about being tied to their employers, and can more accurately compare differences in pay and whatnot.