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It’s supposed to be that insurance converts inherent risk into a predictable cost, but health insurance is not really doing that. The costs remain unpredictable.
The costs remain unpredictable.
I wholly disagree. I predict that the costs will be unnecessarily high.
But predictably. Give me a real fucking number, not just “high.” You can’t do, can you, fuck-face???
Ugly cries angrily and shamefully in the corner knowing that the wrong person just got yelled at
Stop knowing about my face.
In the biblical sense?
Ahhh, but when
But they know that, which is why healthcare costs have consistently increased higher than inflation.
Healthcare is one of THE MOST demand inelastic commodities or services. People do not say “oooh that’s a lot of money - is there a worse doctor who is cheaper?”, instead they say “100% yes I will remortgage my home and sell assets to pay for the cancer treatment my child needs.” Nobody is at the free clinic by choice, they’re there because they cannot afford or borrow to pay for better care.
Capitalism is incompatible with ‘rational consumer purchasing choices’ that apply to clothes, food, TVs, etc. because when there’s death or life altering negative outcomes, the only rational decision is to pay WHATEVER the price demanded is. Healthcare has a demand wall, not a demand curve.
People do not say “oooh that’s a lot of money - is there a worse doctor who is cheaper?”, instead they say “100% yes I will remortgage my home and sell assets to pay for the cancer treatment my child needs.”
I can’t believe how many times I had to make this exact point to dipshits I worked with any time they uttered the term “free market”.
What am I going to do in an emergency in the back of an ambulance on the way to the ER? Hey, can you guys pull over for a sec? I need to check if the current ER doc is in network. Fuuuck ooooffff.
I then recount the time I needed a non-emergency procedure (MRI for my back) which affords me plenty of time to shop around. I proceeded to call around to try to get prices (LOL) and then I got my insurance and MRI place on the phone all at once and I STILL couldn’t get a solid number for how much it would cost me. Who the fuck else needs to be on the call to get a number???
For mathematics wall is a curve. But yeah, completely agree.
Indeed. They have a product. They are withholding it from us.
Insurance is, at its core, a reasonable halfway measure towards public control of a critical resource. If you need something only very rarely, but it’s something that needs to exist ALL THE TIME just in case, insurance allows you to pool your resources with other people in the same boat and afford to keep an industry around just in case. Somebody will always be using it right now, and it’ll be there when you need it, because you paid into the pool.
The problem is, as always, the insertion of capitalism into the solution. If someone has to profit from this set of relationships, the motivation to provide the resource is in competition with the motivation to extract more profit. This is what happened to healthcare.
Insurance is only a halfway measure because we already have an organization capable of managing common resources that individuals use only rarely but which the public needs all the time: that organization is the government, or the governments at various levels. We manage lots of things this way: fixing roads, stopping houses from burning down, pulling people out of floodwaters, that kind of thing. You don’t need it all the time, but it’s there when you need it because you’re paying taxes to a government that has no profit motive from it. Insurance should only ever have existed temporarily while government infrastructure was debated and organized, but the for-profit industry managed to capture enough of the government to keep itself alive indefinitely.
In short, insurance isn’t inherently bad, just not meant to be a permanent fix. Capitalism is bad.
Private insurance should only exist for things that are both a) completely optional, and b) not inevitable (so… evitable?).
Auto insurance? Well, if it’s the law to have it, why is a private company involved whose sole model is to collect money and deny payments?
Health insurance? Well, it’s optional, but you will absolutely need to pay for Healthcare at some point (or you die early). Why, again, should we put an institution in charge whose sole purpose is to make the average person pay more than they get out of it?
Famous athlete leg insurance? High value possession insurance? Have at it, private insurance.
Auto insurance being mandatory makes sense in that the wronged person shouldn’t have their life destroyed because someone can’t drive and afford to replace a car.
They didn’t say auto insurance shouldn’t be mandatory, they said that it shouldn’t be privately run
So it should be a government controlled monopoly?
You’re right. Why would I want a public entity to keep any extra money in the country when I could pay a private mego corporation to funnel it off shore?
Why would I want to fund a public entity to keep publicly available records when I could pay a private company to deny my $1200 claim and boast $104 billion profit?
Is it the choice I get to make between 3 companies that all run the same statistical algorithm for risk assessment and collectively agree to have the same pricing? That’s so much better than having a government beholden to it’s voters and public option control it, right?
And these cunts get to say ‘doctor is wrong you don’t actually need that’
I just thought of a funny concept which is that when you’re born in the country you’re automatically given life insurance. Then when a doctor says “you need this operation” and the health insurance company is like “your doctor is wrong” your life insurance company can come in and be like “you can’t kill my guy, because he’d be owed a gigantic payout!” and then go to war with each other.
It would never work in reality, but I find the idea funny.
What would predictably happen is that the health insurance company would still withhold care, and the life insurance company would deny the payout based on the care being withheld. Then they both would be like “sue me”.
And eventually they would merge and be just one company.
I know I’ll be hated for this, but my wife works for an insurance company, as a doctor, doing chart review. She was always very responsible as a doctor, but the shit she talks about that doctors prescribe is ridiculous.
One case that sticks with me (not even the most egregious, but because of the berating she got from the doctor and the patient), the patient needed a special car seat, which they approved. The doctor also prescribed a 200 dollar car seat cover. Now the seat already comes with a removable and washable cover, this additional one would just make it easier to remove and wash. It was denied as not medically necessary, which it clearly is not. The doctor demanded a consult and then yelled at her the whole time. The patient also called her and yelled at her.
Im a firm supporter of universal healthcare, but the idea that doctors never do ridiculously unnecessary shit, regardless of the reason, requires one to be completely ignorant of how any of this actually works. And so, even with universal health care, some bureaucrat stepping in to determine if a doctor made the right decision would absolutely still be necessary.
Yeah, no, fuck off with that. The doctor is the care provider, not the insurance company, and an insurance company has no fucking business deciding what is or isn’t medically necessary.
Why can’t we have universal healthcare or a public option?
Insurance must be the only industry that actively tries not to deliver the service that its customers pay them for.
well there’s the whole telecom industry too
I’ve been fighting with my insurance company since May. My wife had a medical emergency and I had to take her to the ER at 3AM on a Sunday. The team of doctors treating her all agreed she needed to be hospitalized and have emergency surgery. She was admitted and underwent surgery and was out in three days.
A week after she was discharged we received a letter from the insurance company letting us know they had decided not to cover the $67k hospitalization bill because they had decided it wasn’t medically necessary.
So yeah, that’s great. Not to mention we had finally hit our $6,000 deductible (after I had cardiac issues and ended up in the ER the previous month) so insurance would finally have had to actually pay something.
So glad we pay them $1500 a month for them to make decisions on what is medically necessary and what constitutes an emergency after the fact.
Is this a US thing that I’m to Europe to understand?
My ex suffers seizures. After years of bad doctors, he managed to see a neurological specialist who helped him manage his issues. His doctor informed his insurance that treatment was working and his symptoms had regressed - he even managed to earn his driver license back. His insurance took that as “he’s better now” and kicked him off. They sent him a bill for thousands of dollars that he had to pay before he could try to get back on his plan. He wasn’t able to afford his medication, nor his therapy, and his symptoms came back swinging. I still have a photo of his rejection letter somewhere that I keep as a reminder of how backwards and awful the insurance system is.
Pooling everybody’s money so that the ones who are unfortunate get money to help with their situation definitely is a product. Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Where do you find Insurance like this? Because all of American Health insurance is just about pooling everybody’s money into the pockets of shareholders will denying as much coverage as possible
Where do you find Insurance like this?
Literally all the insurances are like this. If yours isn’t, why are you paying for it?
Maybe because the choices are pay for insurance or live in agony/die? Maybe both, if you’re lucky.
Is it so that there is usually no competition for health insurance providers in the US? I don’t know that system too well.
A little late on this, but this is essentially true. Technically you can buy a plan on the marketplace, but they… kinda suck. The cheapest plan I could get from my state marketplace as a single person household is about $315 a month with a $9000 deductible, and God only knows how many places actually accept it. The available plans and reductions are also very dependent on where you live. The ones available through office jobs are generally cheaper with better coverage and lower deductibles, but anything other than a white collar job will give you absolutely bare bones options if anything at all.
Most places I’ve worked have two plans based on how much you want to pay, but they are offered by the same company so no competition there. The last big contender is Medicaid, which can give pretty good coverage without having to pay a deductible or copay (most of the time). However, there’s monthly income requirements based on which state you live in. Some go as high as $3000/month, some as low as $235 a month.
So that’s pretty much it as far a options go. There’s a whole mess of other vouchers and programs and individual practice discounts that you may or may not have available, but that’s even more dependent on what’s available in your area.
Having worked in Healthcare insurance, I can tell you it’s an absolute mess and no one really knows what’s going on. The whole thing is a rats nest of ever changing policies and algorithms arguing with each other while the humans try to keep up. It’s basically impossible to “call around” as some suggest to figure out how much any given procedure will cost at any given practice with any given insurance, because there’s a high chance that nobody knows until you actually run it.
Also, while looking stuff up for this, I found out that anyone living in a Medicaid funded nursing home is required to give almost all their income to the state to pay for it. Of the roughly $3000 limit, you are allowed to keep at most $200 a month, with most states limiting it to something under $100. So that’s fun.
What is this thread? Since I got chronically ill my insurance has paid my salary for a year and is now paying into unemployment and pension for my wife, who’s caring for me. And besides that they’re still paying for all our medical expenses despite me not paying into them anymore.
Yeah, I had to fight for them to pay for a transport. But overall they definitely are offering a service I am greatly benefitting from.
I’m truly glad that it’s helping someone; however, for every one of you there are a hundred people denied important procedures because insurance has decided its opinion is more important than the doctor’s.
An easily available example off the top of my head is Styropyro’s most recent video where he might have cancer but Insurance has denied his brain scan.
Germany: If your physician thinks, you need your brain scanned, they will give you a referral, you make an appointment for your brain scan, your brain gets scanned, and your physician now knows if your brain has a problem. Your insurance pays for this.
Source: got my brain scanned, brain is fine and at the proper location.
America is largely de-industrialized, it doesn’t “make” much, so instead it’s dominated by Usury, ie financial Capital.
Insurance is a product. Just because you don’t like the product doesn’t make it fake.
Words have meaning.
Words do have meaning. But putting paperwork and process around something that would happen anyway and claiming that paperwork and process IS the thing that would happen anyway is bullshit.
It’s a “product” like “AI” is “artificial intelligence”.
Whatever you say, it’s your head cannon we live in.
The product is you not going broke in case you break your arm.
Doesn’t mean that the american healthcare system is good, it’s a disaster. But claiming insurance is a bad thing is moronic aswell. These are the people that want “free healthcare” like most oft europe, not realizing that the “free” part is because wie habe (somewhat) mandatory health insurance.
…what? Insurance companies are not a “barrier” between doctors and patients. What, do you think some sort of insurance gremlin will manifest out of the ground and kick you in the nuts if you try to visit a doctor while uninsured? Doctors don’t care whether you’re insured or not, as long as they get paid. Insurance companies exist to soften the blow of expensive treatment. The product is not getting completely fucked over if you get very unlucky, just like with any other insurance (life insurance, car insurance, whatever). It’s kind of like bitcoin mining pools, but the other way around. Now, is mandatory health insurance justified? That’s a different discussion.
