UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000% • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by MrSkelter » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 8:41 PM UTC

chis wrote: post #40

I think some critiques of American health insurance are simplistic, but this truly seems very bad. From the report: > "Higher markups can also result in larger internal transfer payments from health plans to affiliated pharmacies, which may allow vertically integrated PBM-pharmacy-insurer entities to retain revenue and profits while formally satisfying the insurers' medical loss ratio ("MLR" ) requirements, but witho…

There is no complexity to the corruption and inefficiency of US healthcare. It has the highest costs and mediocre outcomes. It offers healthcare providers incentives to act even if they shouldn’t and allows insurers to profit directly from denying care.

It’s worse in practice than any system adopted by any peer nation regardless of the wide range of differing approaches to providing universal coverage.

Treating it as some uniquely complicated problem is deceptive. It’s broken because that keeps certain people wealthy and gives employers control over labor.

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

#322

Post by gedpeck » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 5:20 PM UTC

loeg wrote: post #297

gedpeck wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One should not profit from denying care. All health systems ration care. Doing so in a way that people profit from denying care is immoral.

It follows that providers should provide care for free. Anything else is profiting from denying care. I guess you're just a full communist? If that's the case, just come out and say it so we can agree to disagree and move on.

There are other options. Think about it a bit. Nonprofit insurance companies for one. National healthcare is another option that does not require communism. Don’t be a lazy thinker.

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

#323

Post by mindslight » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 7:34 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #274

mindslight wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with this dichotomy. It asserts a monolithic top-down perspective, making it completely inapplicable to the dynamic I described in my last paragraph. It's "universal care" only in the sense that its universe has been defined to exclude most patient agency. Divergence from other possible patient-desired choices then tends to get rationalized away. For example, perhaps having a follow up after 6 months on…

It sounds like you’re talking about what you want, and I’m talking about how I think things are. I don’t see a wealthy country being able to do anything other than some form of universal care with heavy government involvement in the industry to make it happen. There’s nothing preventing it in terms of economics or technology, I just don’t think people will accept it. Most of these systems do allow that sort of patien…

We were both talking about how things ought to be. I was using an example of what I wanted in a specific situation to demonstrate the general lack of patient agency.

Also, it being possible to spend an outsized amount of effort obtaining healthcare outside the system isn't really relevant to discussing the failings of the current mainstream system. Every time I've tried to even get a straightforward price from a doctor in the US, I've been met with indignation like how could I even be asking such a thing.