51–60 of 370 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't that just mean that they have an interest in keeping these costs high ? The higher the costs, the larger that % is for the in absolute dollars. If all the costs come down, they are allowed to make less money.
Bingo. This is why they loved the ACA. Only allowed one scoop of ice cream? Great I'll use an enormous scoop.
Compare to tech companies’ profit margins.
That's the strange spam message I could never understand.
Surely doctors would be delighted at any method to improve health?
So I always assumed the "trick" to be quackery with dangerous side effects. After all, why else would "doctors hate it"?
Eventually I realised these messages are exclusively US American, the only place on the planet where doctors could plausibly resent people improving their health at the expense of their profits (or at least that's the implication that seems to rest on an entrenched cultural cynicism).
Am I totally wrong?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would get in the way of unadulterated profit , you see.
Health insurers in the US have a cap on how much of premiums can go to profits.
That is $675,000,000,000.00 they can take from us and instead of using for healthcare or even healthcare administration, it's just additional money that they took.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would be true if there were a reasonable amount of market understanding by customers and the friction to switching were low. Neither are the case. Most of the time, it takes a qualifying life event or open enrollment (once a year) to switch. And then, understanding the trade offs between plans, which are difficult to understand on a good day, is another barrier.
Then why are insurance company profit margins so low? Why wouldn’t they just jack up premiums irrelevant to their competitors and ignore negotiating pricing and see increasing margins? Low profit margins/multiple sellers indicates a highly competitive field, which means the businesses must be doing something stay in business.
Competition != Productive Competition
Anecdote: I recently had my yearly glasses update. Cost was $188 to me + $20 of insurance copay, so the glasses provider charged $208 for the glasses. That's not too bad, so I asked how much it would be to replace/update the lenses on my old frames, entirely at my charge. It would've been $450. Just for the lenses. I passed. I find it scandalous how much they can charge when just before they were perfectly happy to a…
They likely had lenses already available for the frames they had in stock, or were frequently making batches of them. OTOH the frames you already owned may be out of style, so they would have needed to grind a totally custom pair of lenses, just for you.
Thanks again President Trump!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Health insurers in the US have a cap on how much of premiums can go to profits.
Doesn't that just mean that they have an interest in keeping these costs high ? The higher the costs, the larger that % is for the in absolute dollars. If all the costs come down, they are allowed to make less money.
It’s typical old school GOP policy of leveraging private sector actors with public sector dollars. It’s not awful policy, but did create bad cost incentives and encourages cartel like health networks.
This is regulation everybody should be able to get behind. How are these markets supposed to function efficiently with healthy competition if critical information like this is hidden away?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The accusation here isn't that they are skimming a disproportionate amount, it's that they aren't doing their job, which is to put downwards pressure on provider prices.
The fact that there are at least 5 large insurers competing nationwide and all have 5% or less profit margins means there is lots of competition, and if they are not providing the best prices, their customers will go elsewhere. See pharmacy forums as an example for all the pharmacists complaining about how independent pharmacies are so tough to operate due to ever smaller payments from insurance companies for the pas…
If insurers want to make more money, they can either make medical bills more expensive, or reduce their own operating costs. Reducing the cost of medical bills does not increase the amount of money they make, unless it means they are capturing market share from a competitor.
The problem is that it's nearly-impossible to capture market share. Which insurer do I have? The one that work provides. Did I have any choice in it? No. Did I choose my workplace based on the insurer bundled with it? No. Will my workplace ever switch their insurer provider of choice? Almost certainly 'no'.
How do you capture market share, when all of your customers, and all of your competitors' customers are captives?
[1] Whether or not it was written well is another question.