She doesn't mention the root issue; her and her colleagues absurdly high salaries and the tight limits on new doctors in the US that make medical care scarce and unaffordable but keep their salaries high.
My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
131–140 of 179 posts
Re: My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more interesting hypothetical is: would a NICU stay still cost $1M if the factors inflating that cost (namely, insurance subsidizing hospital revenue) were no longer in place?
I can assure you it wouldn't be $0, or anywhere near close to that. My kiddos were born the day before the third trimester and spent two months in the hospital. Staff it at minimum wage, cap the costs at just the stuff used, and you're still talking a lot of money.
No one is making the claim that the cost of service would be $0. Quite obviously.
What you can't be sure of is the real cost in terms of resources, and how that would be accounted and paid for. The price of your childrens' stay, to you personally, could be far less than what you originally paid personally if healthcare was not reliant on private subsidy. You would also likely be subsidizing the costs of other children staying in the hospital through public subsidy using your tax dollars. I reckon that last point is where a lot of people in the US get hung up.
Re: My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
An itemized bill from the hospital for about four weeks of his hospital stay. It came to a little over $4 million. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-deaths-families-60-min... Woman charged $143,396.66 for a breast biopsy https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-doctors-prescription-to-... Numerous studies have found that when doctors have a financial stake in a hospital, they tend to order more tests and procedures, r…
And you are saying overcharging an insurance company is on the same level as an insurance company denying medical care and directly killing the patient because they don't want to pay? And your examples justify obviously incompetent insurance people vetoing doctor's orders, exactly how? Doctors are generally forbidden to treat patients without directly examining them and knowing their cases. How is it that insurance c…
As it is, insurance rates are rising far faster than inflation rates. Have you checked how much insurance rates have gone on the last few years? It goes up 6% to 25% per year. Where is all this money going? Is it all going to insurance companies? Nope. The price increases are attributable to hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and so on. These price increases are a form of healthcare denial because a lot of people can't even afford health insurance at all, let alone worry about what is approved/denied by insurance companies.
Re: My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can assure you it wouldn't be $0, or anywhere near close to that. My kiddos were born the day before the third trimester and spent two months in the hospital. Staff it at minimum wage, cap the costs at just the stuff used, and you're still talking a lot of money.
No one is making the claim that the cost of service would be $0. Quite obviously. What you can't be sure of is the real cost in terms of resources, and how that would be accounted and paid for. The price of your childrens' stay, to you personally, could be far less than what you originally paid personally if healthcare was not reliant on private subsidy. You would also likely be subsidizing the costs of other childre…
> No one is making the claim that the cost of service would be $0. Quite obviously.
I am making the claim that the cost will be prohibitive to handle via charity, especially as a national healthcare strategy, as proposed upthread.
Re: My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is definitely a case where the insurance company holds the majority of the blame. What facts are the basis of your conclusion? There is no health system in the developed world where a doctor's recommendation will guarantee expensive inpatient treatment without a layer of bureaucratic review.
You are right--Doctors absolutely share blame. Take my dentist's behavior, for example. When the oral hygienist is done doing all the real work, my dentist sits down for 10 minutes to count my teeth and say the words "You should floss more." She bills $85 for that sentence and calls it "Oral hygiene instructions". My insurance company (IMO rightly) denies paying for this. It's ridiculous and the dentist knows they're…
Doctors and dentists in the US are not bound by the same regulations (or even a similar stringency of regulation) involving billing practices and procedure codes.
Re: My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are levels of depression (or other circumstances) at which people are actual drains on their family. While I would never recommend suicide, it is a rational personal choice for some of those with severe health problems that for whatever reason (financial, insurance, whatever) cannot be fixed.
>There are levels of depression (or other circumstances) at which people are actual drains on their family. Committing suicide almost certainly guarantees further suicides within that close family. Children especially... years later. In certain social circles (teenage suicide), it heightens the risk of further teenage suicides, even among non-peers in some cases. Unless the facehugger has just laid an egg in your gut…
> Committing suicide almost certainly guarantees further suicides within that close family.
Not sure why this is downvoted.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...
"The experience of losing a parent to suicide is a strong and independent risk factor for suicidal behaviour in offspring."
Re: My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one is making the claim that the cost of service would be $0. Quite obviously. What you can't be sure of is the real cost in terms of resources, and how that would be accounted and paid for. The price of your childrens' stay, to you personally, could be far less than what you originally paid personally if healthcare was not reliant on private subsidy. You would also likely be subsidizing the costs of other childre…
> No one is making the claim that the cost of service would be $0. Quite obviously. I am making the claim that the cost will be prohibitive to handle via charity, especially as a national healthcare strategy, as proposed upthread.
Do you not agree that charity/philanthropy is already an essential part of the US healthcare strategy?
Re: My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
#138This is a far cry from the gravity of the post, but here's my personal anecdote about trying to navigate health care and insurance. A month or two ago, I was trying to set up a pediatric dentist visit for my son. Not a medical emergency, but a matter of some urgency. I spent about three hours on a total of a dozen phone calls or so. Some to the insurer, and some to various dentist offices in the region to inquire abo…
Similar story for our youngest - excuse after excuse. We just bought two round-trip tickets to Warsaw and paid privately. It was a little more but my wife and son got to spend time with friends and family for that extra. The effort we had spent in US we never got back. I hope it worked-out okay for your family as well.
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Re: My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you are saying overcharging an insurance company is on the same level as an insurance company denying medical care and directly killing the patient because they don't want to pay? And your examples justify obviously incompetent insurance people vetoing doctor's orders, exactly how? Doctors are generally forbidden to treat patients without directly examining them and knowing their cases. How is it that insurance c…
As it is, insurance rates are rising far faster than inflation rates. Have you checked how much insurance rates have gone on the last few years? It goes up 6% to 25% per year. Where is all this money going? Is it all going to insurance companies? Nope. The price increases are attributable to hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and so on. These price increases are a form of healthcare denial because a lot of…
Health insurers tripled their profits while covering 80,000 fewer people 2015-2025 [0]
What is the difference between the 32 developed countries who successfully deliver healthcare to all their residents, vs the wealthiest country of all of them who still fails, and yet spends twice what the rest spend?
Private Insurance runs the whole thing.
And it is a sh*tty business. Insurance company profits do not account for near the 2X difference in spending. That is in the massive waste and bureaucratic overhead of every party trying to keep their heads above water while jumping through the insurer's hoops.
Entire bureaucracies exist just to oppose the insurer's bureaucracies.
And feeding those bureaucracies consumes an insane amount of physician resources.
And exactly zero of it delivers any healthcare to patients.
[0] https://healthcareuncovered.substack.com/p/2025-big-insuranc...
Re: My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source? In my experience, LLMs are especially valuable in that setting. Human generated content tries to put a spin on facts. But with LLMs, you can pull the facts out of such content while making your assumptions explicit. For example, I could point you to this article talking about 12 month+ waiting lists for UK mental health treatment: https://www.rethink.org/news-and-stories/news-and-views/2025... . What is the o…
Great example! I go and ask Gemini about the American equivalent, and get this: > Roughly 40% of the U.S. population resides in federally designated Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs). The shortfall is severe: the national average wait time for care is 48 days, with over half of all U.S. adults with mental illness going completely untreated . Is an 18 month wait worse than an infinite wait? What's the…
I’m not making a point about UK wait times; we’re talking about LLMs as a research tool. I’m using a link I found through Google search as an example to show why LLMs are useful for such questions. As I said in my post, the problem with looking at articles to find an answer is that I don’t know if the data is cherry picked to push a narrative.
Your Gemini query actually proves my point. Average wait times for mental health care in the UK NHS are shorter than you’d think if you Google and search for articles. Because most articles are trying to peddle a narrative.
The fact that 50% of mental health issues go untreated in the U.S. is also interesting. Let’s do a similar query for the U.K.: https://share.gemini.google/69TASFO2sA3S
“Based on the most recent data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS) for 2023/2024, approximately 52.3% of adults in England with a common mental health condition go untreated.”
So it looks like 50% of mental health issues go untreated in the UK as well. Doesn’t that show the value of using LLMs to pull out facts, instead of reading articles that wraps the facts up in spin?