Health insurance in America is a legalized extortion system that converts American lives into investor dollars and enjoys overwhelming support of our ruling class thanks to regulatory capture.
It’s a fundamentally unethical and immoral business comparable to black market arms dealing or human trafficking because of the evils it knowingly perpetuates.
All insurance. I have paid enough to homeowners to buy another house, with no claims. Health insurance we’ve had maybe 5 years where we got out more than we paid in, maybe. Could certainly have bought a dozen cars with what I’ve paid car insurance, net of what they have paid to or for me.
All these you can only win by losing but all are worse for being for-profit rather than just risk pooling.
Health insurance I explain to people as: we are paying in taxes for the most expensive groups (old, poor, sick) plus paying for the work insurance premiums, plus paying most of the cost of seeing a doctor for anything except the annual wellness visit. It would be cheaper to cover everyone with the national plan. But everything we pay, is paying someone else’s salary, right? All those people want it to stay like this.
Always annoys the hell out of me when politicians say BS like, “We know you like your private insurance plan and want to keep it”.
So out of touch.
It’s not entirely out of touch tho. Trust me, there is a not insignificant sect of the populace that firmly believes if private insurance goes away and the country just dips it’s toes into universal healthcare, the communists have won and the country is ruined beyond repair somehow.
After talking to a good amount of these folks, I’ll say the absolute bonkers mental gymnastics to justify that line of thought is truly something to behold.
That’s exactly it. They don’t like it but they view any alternative, especially one forced on them, as worse. If you want to fix the problem, you unfortunately have to coddle the morons and let them voluntarily change when they find out it’s better.
Isn’t there more to it than that though? The “morons” are convinced by a multi-trillion dollar propaganda machine.
I don’t think anyone is immune to propaganda.
Now, this isn’t to say that I know how to counter this, but the scope of the issue is vast.
There is another way-
The population of the UK was very against universal healthcare. The government implemented it anyway. Now threatening the funding of the NHS is a surefire way to not get elected.
It is very out of touch.
Healthy people when polled say they like their health insurance.
Folks who actually have to use their health insurance despise it.
I think they were also trying to keep folks who already had decent insurance plans, and there were definitely a bunch. Thinking of people in good careers who were also on the tail end of when employers treated employees better - there were a lot of people doing comparatively well who had (at least somewhat justifiable, we’re talking healthcare) concerns about the idea of single-provider.
(referring to the “if you like your plan, you can keep it” angle during ACA days)
By definition, a healthcare system based on insurance can’t be as efficient as a universal system. Profits for healthcare companies and hospitals are wasted resources. Also, why the hell is medical school and residency so selective? They basically cap the number of doctors that we can have. We should be increasing the number of doctors. Create a universal system like every other developed country has. Cut out the waste that is private insurance. We pay way more than anywhere else for worse outcomes.
From a medical student: There is a different problem coming up with the production of more physicians. There are more new medical schools opening and existing medical schools are increasing class sizes…but the number of residencies has barely moved in decades. Residencies are funded through Medicare and the number of them is determined by appropriation bills in congress. There are some privately-funded residencies being created, but a lot of those are hideously low quality and being used as a source of indentured servitude by for-profit health groups like HCA. (They won’t even hire their own graduates from their emergency medicine residencies because the quality of the training is so poor.)
And if you don’t complete a residency, you can’t practice independently. You have to have a board certification from an accredited residency to be able to practice medicine, and the only alternatives are working under supervision like a PA/NP…or working for the insurance companies. And you still have a mortgage’s worth of student loans to pay off.
A lot of the doctors working for the insurance companies are ones that couldn’t get into residencies or ones that have not kept up with continuing medical education and likely do not have active board certification anymore.
Agree, these are serious problems. I did consider going in to medicine, but realized that after taking on, like you say, a mortgage payment in student loan debt and spending years making little to no money in school, residencies, and internships, that the “doctors” salary was not that high after all. Rather you’ll spend your first several years playing catch up and paying off debt. Not to mention the hours…
The Biden SAVE plan actually made a massive change that makes it a lot more viable, especially if you do the PSLF program. It’s set up so that if you’re on an income-driven repayment plan, any interest not covered by your payment does not capitalize. So you might not make any progress on the principal of the loan while you’re in residency, but it won’t spiral out of control and the reduced payments count towards the 120 PSLF payments. I’m planning on doing a 3 year residency at minimum, maybe more, and probably a fellowship as well, so I’ll have 5 years of reduced payments, and then I’ll be working in non-profit community/county hospitals after that so I’ll be able to use PSLF. Running the numbers, I think the government will be eating about $275k-$300k of my loans.
My father-in-law always grunts “socialism something something” whenever I mention supporting a universal healthcare system. Of course, he does that while being on Medicare.
The part I find most puzzling is we just elected a guy who wants to repeal Obamacare along with a lot of other corporate regulations…… this country amazes me
A lot of those voters are on Medicare. They aren’t clued into the fact that Trump and a lot of his (real) base would love to completely gut Medicare and Social Security.
