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Meanwhile, these insurance companies are making billions of dollars of profit (https://www.axios.com/profits-are-booming-at-health-insurance-companies-151330249

by panic 9y ago

Meanwhile, these insurance companies are making billions of dollars of profit (https://www.axios.com/profits-are-booming-at-health-insurance-companies-1513302495-18f3710a-c0b4-4ce3-8b7f-894a755e6679.html https://www.axios.com/profits-are-booming-at-health-insuranc...). There's no reason insurance companies need to be involved in health care at all.

Ntrails 9y ago
> There's no reason insurance companies need to be involved in health care at all. As a Brit I sort of agree, because I think free healthcare at point of delivery is the right solution. However the more continental model works perfectly well and many countries use private insurers for that sort of model. Insurance companies have a lot of expertise in risk management, analysis and costing so to claim that they've no place in healthcare is odd.
- beat 9y ago
  Getting far afield here, but... there's something uniquely broken about the financial model of the US system. Pretty much every industrialized nation in the world pays about half as much per capita as the US does for its health care, and pretty much all of them provide universal coverage. And this is everyone, from purely socialist systems to mostly private systems. Which is why I have issues with both the right-wing insistence that nothing is wrong with ours that a little more free market can't cure, and the left-wing insistence that only a purely socialist single payer system will provide financial responsibility and social justice.
ams6110 9y ago
Billions of profit out of trillions spent on health care. Insurance company profits are not the real problem with health care costs.
- shkkmo 9y ago
  Insurance profits seems to make up only about 1% of our total private healthcare expenditures. However, that doesn't take into account the amount of those healthcare expenditures that are being spent to generate those profits rather than to provide healthcare. It also doesn't account for the additional costs to non-insurers from systemic problems created and maintained insurers to increase their profits. (E.G. pushing filing/approval costs onto physician's offices or systemically fixing prices). So while Insurance company profits are not the direct cause of the outlandish healthcare costs in the US, they are a huge contributor to our problem and a core driver for many of it's multitudinous factors.
zaroth 9y ago
> There's no reason insurance companies need to be involved in health care at all. There are a very many good reasons to have insurance for health care expenses, in fact they are the perfect example of where insuring for the average cost helps those who see orders of magnitude larger costs due to black swan events that would otherwise ruin them. Another interesting stat showing how important health insurance is; 5% of policyholders are responsible for 95% of total costs. Now you can argue that you think a national, government run, single payer insurance company would be more efficient, or more fair, or result in better health outcomes, or... but that’s an argument for a different kind of insurance company. It doesn’t change the fact that there is an insurance company very directly and intimately involved in your health care.
- shkkmo 9y ago
  > Now you can argue that you think a national, government run, single payer insurance company would be more efficient, or more fair, or result in better health outcomes, or... but that’s an argument for a different kind of insurance company. Anybody arguing for that as an alternative to our current system is... uninformed. We already have it, and we spend more per capital on (non-universal) public healthcare via that government run insurance than many countries with public universal health care (including Canada, and the UK). Obviously it is not our lack of "publicly run health insurance" that is the problem here.

by panic 9y ago

Ntrails 9y ago

> There's no reason insurance companies need to be involved in health care at all. As a Brit I sort of agree, because I think free healthcare at point of delivery is the right solution. However the more continental model works perfectly well and many countries use private insurers for that sort of model. Insurance companies have a lot of expertise in risk management, analysis and costing so to claim that they've no place in healthcare is odd.

beat 9y ago
Getting far afield here, but... there's something uniquely broken about the financial model of the US system. Pretty much every industrialized nation in the world pays about half as much per capita as the US does for its health care, and pretty much all of them provide universal coverage. And this is everyone, from purely socialist systems to mostly private systems. Which is why I have issues with both the right-wing insistence that nothing is wrong with ours that a little more free market can't cure, and the left-wing insistence that only a purely socialist single payer system will provide financial responsibility and social justice.

ams6110 9y ago

Billions of profit out of trillions spent on health care. Insurance company profits are not the real problem with health care costs.

shkkmo 9y ago
Insurance profits seems to make up only about 1% of our total private healthcare expenditures. However, that doesn't take into account the amount of those healthcare expenditures that are being spent to generate those profits rather than to provide healthcare. It also doesn't account for the additional costs to non-insurers from systemic problems created and maintained insurers to increase their profits. (E.G. pushing filing/approval costs onto physician's offices or systemically fixing prices). So while Insurance company profits are not the direct cause of the outlandish healthcare costs in the US, they are a huge contributor to our problem and a core driver for many of it's multitudinous factors.

zaroth 9y ago

> There's no reason insurance companies need to be involved in health care at all. There are a very many good reasons to have insurance for health care expenses, in fact they are the perfect example of where insuring for the average cost helps those who see orders of magnitude larger costs due to black swan events that would otherwise ruin them. Another interesting stat showing how important health insurance is; 5% of policyholders are responsible for 95% of total costs. Now you can argue that you think a national, government run, single payer insurance company would be more efficient, or more fair, or result in better health outcomes, or... but that’s an argument for a different kind of insurance company. It doesn’t change the fact that there is an insurance company very directly and intimately involved in your health care.

shkkmo 9y ago
> Now you can argue that you think a national, government run, single payer insurance company would be more efficient, or more fair, or result in better health outcomes, or... but that’s an argument for a different kind of insurance company. Anybody arguing for that as an alternative to our current system is... uninformed. We already have it, and we spend more per capital on (non-universal) public healthcare via that government run insurance than many countries with public universal health care (including Canada, and the UK). Obviously it is not our lack of "publicly run health insurance" that is the problem here.