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Culture war going hot: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/04/us/brian-thompson-united-healthcare-death/index.html
A gunman has killed the CEO of United Healthcare this morning, and has disappeared into the city. I’m somewhat surprised this isn’t more common, especially given the nature of healthcare company’s profit motives. I could imagine “we denied your wife’s medical claim and are sorry for her death. Also your bill is past due and we are sending you to collections. Thank you understanding.” might be a story that exists in a lot of people.
Expect to see more private security, more private flights, more underground parking and armored cars and so forth for a while.
This was clearly an assassination.
Your anger at health insurance companies is misplaced. If the profit motive is the problem, a public option is a solution, but American voters (especially right-leaning ones) have been pretty emphatic about refusing it.
Companies have to deny some claims or else premiums would have to rise for everyone. UHC's profit margins are actually far lower than e.g. Apple's.
Yeah, and they're dumbasses for doing that, which is my biggest disagreement with the Republican party. I was a single-issue on this for several years in the 2010s before I realized the Democratic party would never spend political capital on solving the problem -- which they do, largely, because of lobbying by the health insurance companies, for which reason I hate them.
May I ask why you think conservatives are stupid for denying public insurance options? As someone who has experience in both (consumer side) private and public insurance, the only reason why public insurance is affordable is because expenses are shifted to taxpayers instead of the individual insurer. The actual price per service is no different: collective bargaining does not give the government any particular advantage in negotiating prices for services. Almost all public health services have massive budget overages and increased costs which are expected to increase as time continues as well as having issues with patient backlogs.
In the US, Medicare (for elderly and for certain qualified disabilities) accounts for 17% of the national budget. Once again, the only reason for affordability is due to the taxpayer shouldering the costs whose base is dwindling. This isn't even accounting for standard government inefficiency as the US government is incoherently cost insensitive and unable to make sensible budgetary decisions.
So while I agree that private health insurance has many issues, it at least is self-maintaining and doesn't have the large macro issues that government health programs are currently facing.
30% of US health expenses are attributed to administration, which in the US context usually means the armies of secretaries hired by hospitals to not mess up billing and to argue with insurance providers, who have their own armies of secretaries hired to deny claims. If there were a public option in the US, it would (hopefully) make clear what is covered and what is not in an unambiguous way, which would make these armies of secretaries redundant.
But who am I kidding? Health care inefficiency is a jobs program for millions of white-collar PMC employees of extractive middlemen, and it will remain popular to kvech about high prices while doing nothing to bargain down prices as long as we rely on "employers" to pay for our medical expenses. Meanwhile kickbacks and bribes are legal as long as the people being bribed are responsible for buying health care equipment for us (hospital administrators) and buying drugs for us (group purchasing organizations). The corruption has been normalized.
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