alt Hacker NewsUS healthcare is very strange in that on one hand it pinches pennies and is incentivized to not fund treatment, but on the other hand there seems to be some kind of internal incentivize to spend liberally and do everything.
The whole system is a mess of perverse incentives. I've often described it as "everything bad about socialized medicine combined with everything bad about privatized medicine."
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alightsoul • yesterday at 10:48 PM
This is what happens when healthcare is for profit.
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Some people thought it was a good idea to cap [administration cost + profit] of health insurance companies as a percentage of premiums. As a result, health insurance administrators have two ways to increase their compensation: they can compete to acquire more customers, or they can artificially inflate costs per customer. Guess which one is easier! Now you don't have to wonder why medication is half the cost when you buy it without insurance...
Love to hear all the time how the "free market" is ruining healthcare. Of course everyone knows a "free market" is when you have profit caps, supply restrictions (residency cap), government-run marketplaces, byzantine tax subsidies tying insurance to employment for no reason, etc etc