131–140 of 314 posts
Thanks, capitalism. Snarky as that may sound, it's a simple statement of fact: our society places a higher value on capital allocation than human life, and so the most vulnerable people are stripped of their assets and dignity to satisfy the demand for wealth. Frankly, I think socialized medicine would also reduce violence in society if deployed as part of a larger economic realignment.
Of the 9.5 million cancer diagnoses studied between 2000–2012, researchers discovered that 42.4 percent of patients (median age 68.6±9.4 years) spent all of their money, averaging $92,098. This follows disturbing news from earlier this year that 40 percent of Americans can't afford to pay $400 in case of an emergency. The math is not adding up. No, the math doesn't make sense. Either the author of the linked article…
Though now that I think about it, maybe the alternator fix is the more effective altruism, because it's something that can keep someone from falling a rung on the economic ladder, and being unable to afford health care. There's never enough, is there.
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Car insurance has no lifetime limit. The limit is either per year or per event.
Car insurance is sold in a 6-month or 12-month policy term, with a "lifetime limit" during that term. You can buy a new policy at the end of the term, but the insurance company isn't obliged to sell it to you.
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And before people get too comfortable -- Every single "Obamacare replacement" plan does away with the ban on lifetime caps either directly or indirectly. These are enormously beneficial to insurance companies (they essentially have unlimited liability without them) and there is a ton of money to have the caps reinstated.
> These are enormously beneficial to insurance companies (they essentially have unlimited liability without them) and there is a ton of money to have the caps reinstated. I don't understand why you'd phrase it this way. Under the ACA, 80% of premiums have to go to medical care. A dollar saved providing care disproportionately benefits the premium payers, not the company. People act like all this money comes out of in…
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UHC paid out over $100 billion in care. How much it pays its CEO is completely irrelevant, except as an emotional appeal and rage bait. The system may not be functioning properly, but it has nothing to do with how much UHC's CEO makes, or shareholders make. (UHC's profit margin is just 7.5%). The decision of whether to have limits on how much you're willing to spend for one case exists whether you have a private syst…
What strikes me as disingenuous about your posture is this: You are basically arguing that the insurers are introducing lifetime caps (making life much worse for the affected individuals, basically nullifying the whole point of insurance) not out of concern for their profit margin, but out of the goodness of their hearts to keep the premiums low for the paying public. That strikes me as unlikely. Of course, if you do…
Lowering premiums allows insurers to win customers away from competing insurers. It's e.g. why HP sells business laptops with awful LCD panels. It's not because HP makes fat profits on each laptop (their margins are razor thin). It's because the lower price allows them to take sales away from competitors.
> However, if there is one government/single payer insurer, nobody would ever dream up the insane idea of saying, hey, if you're really fucked, we'll stop paying your health bills, so we can shave off a few dollars of everyone's premiums.
Of course they would! You think government bureaucrats aren't under pressure to control outlays? https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/5/8/1660050/-Death-Pan...
> In the UK, the NHS has a system based on QALYs — quality-of-life years. In crude terms, it values a year of normal health at £30,000, so if the proposed course of treatment will cost £150,000, the patient would need to have good prospects of having five years of normal life once the treatment is over to get it. For a patient who would need assistance to live because they can’t walk more than a few steps or what have you, the QALY figure might drop to £15,000, so the patient would have to have an expectancy of 10 years of assisted life to get the treatment.
Note that in the example in the story, the lifetime limit was $500,000, or 380,000 pounds. In the UK, the guy would've needed to live 12-13 years to justify spending that much. He had an aggressive cancer and died a year later, while receiving treatment. Under the U.K. system, the NHS would've been willing to pay well under $100,000 with that prognosis.
The idea that "one government/single payer insurer" systems wouldn't have these sorts of limits is the product of the exact gas-lighting I was complaining about. By focusing on the insurance companies, and the fictional fat profit margins out of which benefits can be paid for with no cost to rate payers, it totally obscures the fact that, at the end of the day, a functioning healthcare system needs to make decisions about when to cut off care.
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> These are enormously beneficial to insurance companies (they essentially have unlimited liability without them) and there is a ton of money to have the caps reinstated. I don't understand why you'd phrase it this way. Under the ACA, 80% of premiums have to go to medical care. A dollar saved providing care disproportionately benefits the premium payers, not the company. People act like all this money comes out of in…
> I don't understand why you'd phrase it this way. Under the ACA, 80% of premiums have to go to medical care. A dollar saved providing care disproportionately benefits the premium payers, not the company. The retained premiums rule and the lifetime limit ban were both adopted as part of the ACA; lifetime limits only existed before the ACA, and indeed benefited the insurance companies. > Lifetime caps insure that you,…
How many people "lose" their life savings for having children.
How many people "lose" their life savings to buy a home/food clothing.
Your body/health is more important than any of the above.... why the negative term "lose" instead of "spent money on health/life"?
I recently watched a family member go through this. A few things that were sobering to see: - Three weeks in she was buried in paperwork. One chemo treatment would turn into 4-5 invoices from different subcontractors at a single hospital, some covered by her insurance, others not covered. Her insurer denied claims arbitrarily and made her go through a bunch of invasive and unnecessary procedures to prove her illness.…
The abundance of companies using dark patterns in their subscriptions to prevent subscription cancellations has led to other companies offering services that allow you to manage your various subscriptions with ease and cancel subscriptions with even greater ease. I'm wondering what it would take to apply the same mindset to managing healthcare-related paperwork.
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The entire point of insurance is to pool risk so that a bunch of people together pay reasonable amounts, instead of a few people paying enormous amounts and the others paying less. Lifetime limits give you lower rates in exchange for making the insurance much less like actual insurance. If we’re talking about “don’t piss on my leg and tell me its raining,” don’t sell me “health insurance” that will leave me high and…
It's absurd to say that imposing a limit is somehow misleading for something sold as "insurance." "Actual insurance" almost always has a policy limit. Everything from car insurance to corporate liability insurance has a limit. I can't think of any "actual insurance" besides health insurance that doesn't have a limit. Again, I'm not arguing against having health insurance be unlimited. I'm taking exception to your rhe…
The problem is simple - in most developed countries, health insurance doesn't bankrupt the people it serves. It also doesn't have policy limits for common terminal illnesses.
So why does this happen in the US - a country with insanely high costs and relatively mediocre health outcomes?
The problem isn't insurance, it's the influence that unregulated privatised insurance has had on health industry costs as a whole.
Hospitals, medical professionals, pharma companies, and insurance companies are all primarily motivated by profit, and will price gouge patients to the maximum extent possible.
Insurance companies may be regulated intermediaries, but in reality many insurance companies are actually owned by hospital chains.
They simply provide a layer of regulated bureaucracy that disguises and legitimises the price gouging.
So while technically it's true that insurance companies have regulated margins, it's also a misdirection. The true role of the insurers is to provide corporate and bureaucratic cover for the outrageous sharking and exploitative profiteering in the rest of the industry.
Customers - i.e. patients - most certainly do not benefit from this arrangement. Shareholders and CEOs very much do.
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Yeah, the study appears to be looking at 2000–2012. The lifetime limit ban started on March 23rd 2010, according to this Vox article: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/15/14563182/o... Thanks Obama.
Every European health care system, I believe, has some way of limiting the amount of care provided to people. It is just not so out in the open as a dollar cap on what people can get in a lifetime. Not every possible, super-expensive procedure is approved to be available to people through the public healthcare system. (Would love to hear of a country that has "universal health care" that does not limit what procedure…
Is there a public example of a rich person that 'beat' cancer this way?