The dudes a clown and deserves the death penalty

Depends on perspective

Also invest in private security stoinks
They boutta pop off hard

Business exists to make a profit. Insurance exists as a business only to cover emergencies. Burst appendix? That's a $35,000 bill you don't want to pay. That's why you spent the last 50 years paying insurance.

Unfortunately, once you start allowing people to willfully live completely unhealthy lives, and force insurance companies to cover elective and "at-will" conditions that the patient is completely responsible for, like morbid obesity and type 2 diabetes, suddenly the system starts to buckle fast.

The #1 issue here was that the ACA aka Obamacare forced insurance companies to put 80% of all revenue into patient payout. Based on the actual costs of procedures, as well as number of procedures, cost of office visits, and cost of prescriptions, they had no viable way of hitting that target at that time. That was why almost immediately after the passage of the ACA, you saw office visits immediately jump from $80 to $200-500. Why a simple Albuterol asthma inhaler went from $5, where it had been at for decades, to $100 (they cost about $1.50 from production all the way to the store shelf).

It's the need to pay the insurance company's overhead period, and their fiduciary duty to their stockholders that forced insurance company to negotiate HIGHER prices, and bring MORE profits into the Pharma companies and medical practices.

I think your number 1 failing is that you believe that insurance is "healthcare". It is not. It is a financial service. And everything you believe is silly, because you don't understand that basic fact.

Insurance is what you have in lieu of healthcare, and its hilarious that all you lot do is blame obamacare, i was in america BEFORE obamacare passed, i met a homeless 14 year old who's mother was in hospital and the bank foreclosed on the family..
Guess what the number 1 cause of bankrupcy was in america before obama was president was?
Oh yeah.. still health care costs.
Now its great that you mentioned a burst apendix.. because that is the ONLY time i ever had to spend a lot of money on healthcare.. why?
Because my family is fully insured.. my wifes apendix burst and a receptionist ticked a box that said pre existing.. literally impossible but the insurance company aig refused to pay out, it was $12,500.
Later i had a much more complicated surgery duadenum, apendix and gall bladder removed and it cost me $700 for the anaesthesia and the rest was covered by my countries health system.

See what i mean you are calling me silly and saying i believe things i do not believe, i know exactly what your garbage insurance is and i stand by the fact that it is a parasitical middle man there to sap profits from peoples suffering, you think this is great, that is where we disagree.
You say nonsense like "fiduciary duty" and think we should all bow before the great god of capitalism, i see those words and i see sociopathic nonsense.
You do not have to destroy lives for profit, that is optional.

This post was edited by Plaguefear on Dec 22 2024 12:32pm

Insurance has had to bargain against the people to do what they've been dictated to do by the government. Thousands of insurance companies no longer exist because there was no way to meet overhead while trying to do the best for the customer. It's not insurance companies that have made it big under the ACA. Remember, when they negotiate higher prices with Pharma, doctors, and surgeons, it's pharma, doctors, and surgeons that reap the profit, NOT the insurance companies.

You do not know what you're talking about. Your inability to separate between a healthcare service and a financial service is incredibly disturbing.

Nothing you say is grounded in reality.
Your healthcare is so enmeshed with financial services that it is almost impossible to tell where one starts and the other ends.
You keep trying to pretend multi billion dollar corporations are hard done by and that the lives they ruin are in the common good of share value.
Again, I disagree with you, I am not dumb, I just see the world through such a completely different lense that you struggle to comprehend it, it's impossible to understand empathy if you have never felt it.

This post was edited by Plaguefear on Dec 22 2024 02:09pm

You're both trying to spin the same set of facts through a different lens. But reality isn't subjective. In the end, the ACA had pretty inarguable changes on healthcare outcomes. It dramatically expanded benefits to people who would have been uninsured / uninsurable otherwise. Emergency rooms are so very obviously filled with indigent people receiving free care now that it leads to long lines and delays of services. It dramatically skyrocketed costs of premiums as well as taxpayer subsidization / risk corridors / etc. It dropped the profit margins for insurers.
And those numbers also reflect by tighter regulation of insurers can't squeeze more blood from a stone. When insurers are paying 85% of premiums/subsidies on medical expenses and 15% on administrative services and getting 3% profit margins, then even if you could wave a magic wand and eliminate all private insurance overhead and replace it with a government run system that somehow doesn't cost just as much in bureaucratic graft (which it would) but drops instead to a fraction, you'd still only be getting marginal expense reductions. But the ACA didn't make insurance marginally more expensive or expand benefits marginally, it ballooned both, by orders of 2-3x.


you can look at the costs from an input or output of the system. Either reducing the benefits being paid out, or reducing the embarrassingly exorbitant money made by those doctors, surgeons and pharmaceutical companies. The middle men are already so heavily regulated and have their rates micromanaged by the government that you can't keep shaking them upside down and expecting to shave off 2/3 of the healthcare costs to compensate for the ACA

Should have just made a single payer system and cut all the parasites from the supply chain.

As I said, 1. that presupposes that government bureaucracy is going to be more efficient than private insurers, which is a big 'if' because everything about government graft and waste points to the opposite and 2. the administrative costs of insurers is marginal and doesn't come anywhere even remotely close to the level of expanded benefits and ballooning costs of that supply chain. From 2010 to 2023 the total healthcare spending skyrocketed from $2.6T to $4.9T (adj), while insurer profit margins dropped from 5-6% down to 3% and insurers have 85% medical loss ratios. When spending is at 200% previous levels, you can't offset it with a cut to the 15% of administrative costs (as if they wouldn't just be replaced by 15% of public sector bureaucracy)

Any structural call for reining in healthcare needs to either reduce benefits being paid out, or tackle the underlying costs of doctors/pharma ie nationalizing production, or both.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Dec 22 2024 03:42pm

Every first world country on earth has figured it out, I am sure America can.