Health "insurance" companies in the US are not actually, primarily insurers. For the most part, they are not in the business of insuring rare events. Maybe they were primarily in the insurance business at some point in the past, but today they are mainly in the business of entrenching themselves in the middle of all interactions between patients, doctors, and hospitals, and extracting rents from all of them. Health "insurance" companies have become extractive businesses that produce nothing of evident value except unpleasant paperwork, and extract an economic rent for it, to the detriment of everyone else. I call them "paperwork-shuffling processors."
Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing
71–80 of 304 posts
Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I disagree. We have a system of laws and courts to decide what is criminal. People should not kill law abiding citizens they disagree with because everyone has a different opinion.
> We have a system of laws and courts to decide what is criminal. Good when it works, but what happens when it fails?
yeah, blood in the street and mass death and destruction. Everyone killing everyone.
Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
would love some sources to learn more about how it works if you have any to recommend
While not directly related to your question, I think this will help answer many questions you may have about our spending. This is a good start comparing america's healthcare expenditure to other countries' expenditures: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o... The short of it, on a national level: Health spending is determined by income Income predicts changes in health expenditure The rising…
Interesting that we consume more services and have less doctors. I wonder if doctors respond to incentives.
Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing
#74> But that did not stop social media commenters from leaping to conclusions and from showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children . The journalists' tone and choice of words here, which I've italicized, isn't helping the overall feeling many Americans have of "the people running the show have active and unceasing contempt for us", which of course is what's dr…
> I'm sorry, but where do these writers get off wagging their fingers and tut-tutting people who'd prefer not to spend their neurons on sympathy for someone at the helm of an inhuman system? And what exactly is your solution? Healthcare should be a charity from the rich? It should be nationalized, and somehow magically all the problems go away?
You’ve got the answer right there. It should be nationalized. And a major reason it will never be nationalized is because of lobbying by health insurance corporations.
Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have a system of laws and courts to decide what is criminal. Good when it works, but what happens when it fails?
yeah, blood in the street and mass death and destruction. Everyone killing everyone.
That sounds pretty extreme. There's a large amount of possibility between those two positions. ;)
Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this guy is also about the most unsympathizable man in the country. There's no way that is true. It's only remotely possibly true if you're only talking about people who at least nominally obey the rules and laws of society. You don't actually think that he was worse than a murderer, or a rapist, or a child abuser, of which we have many, many thousands in this country.
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"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic."
-Joseph Stalin
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...
Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What I do find disappointing is the lack of concern This is (was) the CEO of the largest health insurer in the country which has shown a lack of concern for paying out insurance or securing data both private and medical. Their data leak this year is second only to National Public Data's leak (also this year) of practically every single SSN on the planet and arguably worse because their leak also contains medical dat…
> this guy is also about the most unsympathizable man in the country. There's no way that is true. It's only remotely possibly true if you're only talking about people who at least nominally obey the rules and laws of society. You don't actually think that he was worse than a murderer, or a rapist, or a child abuser, of which we have many, many thousands in this country.
The sheer breadth of misery this person inflicted through his actions is hard to quantify, and trying to say who is worse/better will always be a judgement call. But the broad dislike for this person doesn't come from nowhere..
Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this guy is also about the most unsympathizable man in the country. There's no way that is true. It's only remotely possibly true if you're only talking about people who at least nominally obey the rules and laws of society. You don't actually think that he was worse than a murderer, or a rapist, or a child abuser, of which we have many, many thousands in this country.
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I recognize a distinction between a premeditated direct intent to kill someone, and whatever it was this guy did. If you have different values then you might not.
Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing
#79It's mostly not rational. For instance, much of the conversation over the last day has been about Anthem pushing back on anesthesiology pay on the East Coast. That's people angry about their insurers working to make surgeries cost less by employing the literal guideline Medicare uses, and yet people online were overtly suggesting Anthem's CEO be murdered over it. Incoherent. This won't win me any points in this parti…
I'm honestly not sure if I should attribute this comment to disingenuity, ignorance or just bad faith. > pushing back on anesthesiology pay on the East Coast. Not even close. BCBS was just pushing extra charges onto patients. > insurers working to make surgeries cost less This is laughably ill-informed, I don't know where to begin. The only thing insurers are doing is increasing the gap between what they collect and…
Anthem proposed to apply the precise guidelines Medicare uses to pay for anesthesiology, including references to those CMS guidelines. Billing for anesthesiology has been a hot button issue: the search you want is [anesthesia surprise billing]. Anesthesiology is one of the highest-paid specialties in American medicine.
You cannot reasonably support Medicare and claim that Anthem was doing something unconscionable, because Anthem was adopting Medicare's own policies.
Medicare's admin cost ratio is a function of who it covers. Somewhere in the comment history on HN, there's a short writeup I did of how the math works out if you extend Medicare to the whole population; the admin overhead, for obvious reasons, shoots up --- people pay the same amount of money but require far fewer services, reversing the "advantage" Medicare has in the metric currently.
Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what drives such high costs in US healthcare, some years back. My conclusion is everything does. This conveniently makes it easy to dismiss criticism of any one part (all of which are responsible) because “well they’re just increasing it a little—go look at these other things, they’re bad too, and if you add up all of that, they’re worse!” Right, but if you keep not ad…
Realistically, the big cost differential in absolute terms in healthcare are borne in the elder group (65+). See this: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7411536/ . This is exactly where the "government social safety net" takes effect (medicare and medicaid) and, in my opinion, the real spending bazooka of US subsidies take effect. I say this as someone who wound up owning one business in this area (health insu…
Yes, we pay more per-capita for our public healthcare system than some countries do for universal coverage, but we don’t cover everyone. Just for the public parts.
Once you actually tally up how many people are having their healthcare paid for by public dollars—local, state, and federal workers plus retired; the military, active and retired; Medicare (old people); Medicaid (poor and disabled); CHIP (poor kids); the families of some of those categories; et c—it’s really not the case that moving to entirely public-funded would even be as big a leap as one might suppose. A whole lot of people already have government-funded healthcare.
What we really lack, that every single other OECD state I’ve looked at has as a feature of their healthcare systems, is more-aggressive price controls, either set directly or via partial or complete monopsony. We’ve sniffed around at it, but never taken a full bite.