UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

I haven't seen any defenses of insurance companies lately. In fact, it seems like insurance companies are the only safe target for criticism of US healthcare problems right now.

> Virtually every insurance provider is going up 15-20% / year to the point that it’s completely unsustainable.

The elephant in the room is that healthcare costs are going up. Even if we waved a magic wand and eliminated health insurance overhead, profits, and executive pay, your rates would still be going up that same 15-20% per year.

This is the part that seems to confuse everyone. There's a common misconception that insurance companies are raking in huge profits and that prices would plummet if we could just eliminate those profits. You see it throughout this thread with phrases like "dancing on the graves all the way to the bank" and blaming "capitalism" or "corporate greed" with the implication that insurance companies are the purveyors of this greed.

Yet we have non-profit insurance companies. They're not appreciably cheaper. If you look at insurance company profits, they're actually relatively low for companies that large. If you map healthcare spending on a big pie chart, the slice that goes to insurance company administrative overhead and profits is not that big. Single digit percentage. Even companies with socialized medicine have some overhead in this same slice.

The problem is multifactorial. The challenge is that it's not politically safe to touch on some of the drivers of US healthcare costs. Everyone loves to point at insurance companies and drug pricing because it's easy, but things get much quieter when you point out that our doctors, surgeons, and providers are paid substantially more than their peers in other countries. Americans also love to consume more healthcare and many would be very upset if they were forced to accept the level of allowed care and delays in other countries. It's not just insurance companies who have decision trees about when and what care is allowed. Americans also consume medications at an extremely high rate. Again, they don't take kindly to suggestions that we limit prescribing or drug prescriptions (see outrage over the DEA limits on amphetamine production or complaints about hesitancy to prescribe opioids, even though we already consume far more opioids than most countries).

Many Americans also live unhealthy lifestyles which contribute greatly to healthcare costs, but it's taboo to mention that. Everyone has seen the life expectancy charts showing US lagging international peers, but fewer people have seen the per-state version that shows that life expectancy depends heavily on where you live (and therefore what you eat, how active you are, and the local culture). Instead, the only acceptable target of blame is our food. While we have some room for improvement, we're not going to solve the obesity epidemic and lifespan problems by banning red dyes. Lifestyles and diets need to change, but that's a difficult topic. Much easier to point the finger at insurance companies, "CEOs", and the food industry and pretend that those cover all that is wrong with healthcare.

This is why it's politically difficult to accomplish anything in the United States. If anyone tried to copy and paste the health care system of a European country, from doctor pay to allowed procedures to more limited prescribing practices, there would be riots. People want all the healthcare, they want it now, they want it how they decide, and they want someone else to pay for it.

Why is insurance charging anyone for drugs? Shouldn't the pharmacy/doctor/hospital charge the patient and the insurance company pay some percentage of the cost (maybe negotiating the price of the drugs downward)? It seems we've overcomplicated a system that should be much simpler.

Kaiser had an income of 4.1B in 2023 vs. UHG's 371.6B in an industry of 4.8T [1]. I'm not sure the point you're trying to make or why it's relevant unless you're asking me to read between the lines on the efficacy of Kaiser as a non-profit vs. their for-profit counterparts (which is what seems to be the case).

edit: I think I missed the last part of your comment in an edit, so to attempt to answer my own questions, it's not a fair comparison beyond just the almost 100x size difference to compare a different business model and scope, provider network, risk pool and geographic presence yet ignore every other developed country in the world and say that for profit is the way to go because if Kaiser can't do it then nobody can.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/....

A historical aside, the reason private health insurance was created in the US was World War 2.

I could be misremembering pieces, but the long and short of it was that salary compensation was capped/restricted during World War 2 and so companies began offering benefits outside of salary, private health insurance among them, to retain their employees.

Yeah, we need to be careful with using something like MSRP because of what that S means. I would rather we find a different baseline more fundamental to the cost of production than something that essentially amounts to "the price is the price". But I'm right there with you, and I think it's a good start.