alt Hacker NewsFirey take, but health insurers are not the problem they are made out to be. They're on your team and benefit from lower prices just as much as you do. They don't make any money either, don't argue with me, buy their stocks if you are so convinced and see how that goes over.
Health care providers carry immense blame. It's full of passionless people in it for the outsized paychecks, who once inside will just seek whatever local minimum to stay employed.
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Insurers are only allowed to keep a % as profits. Higher spending increases the absolute amount of profit that can be retained.
Having worked in medicine, I agree about providers. People who probably got in it to help people burn out immediately and become like the rest of us looking for the best paycheck with a tolerable workplace.
Insurance companies make plenty of money though. Cigna makes $7-8B per year and pays a decent dividend.
They add an entire layer of make work and waste just for existing.
> health insurers...'re on your team and benefit from lower prices just as much as you do
You're missing a very, very, very important piece here.
Which is that the lowest price of all is to deny treatment entirely.
They are not on your team, they are the opposite team. Their revenue is basically fixed, at the level of your premiums. But the more health care they pay for you to receive, the less profit they make. That's just arithmetic.
This is why there are so many horror stories of people being denied necessary treatment, or having to fight for months and years to get their treatment actually paid for. Insurance providers are incentivized to do their absolute best at taking your money and then not paying for care, through every sort of technicality and "mistake" and arbitrary judgment and limit they can come up with.
If health insurers are on my team why do they blatantly lie about their network coverage to me? Why do they list providers as in-network, when the providers consider themselves out of network?
Why aren't the executives of these insurers shilling ghost networks not in prison for mail fraud?
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