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I don't understand how medical insurance companies can choose what treatments can be applicable to what patients and yet not be as liable as a doctor for medica

• xyzzyz 4y ago
  It’s not that they choose the treatment, you can get whatever treatment you want. They just say that they won’t pay for treatment other than X. This is unavoidable, really: if you look at countries with public healthcare system, like eg. UK, the (state) insurer there also makes decisions as to which treatments are covered, and which patients are eligible to get them. If anything, they are more conservative than private insurers in US: due to public nature, typically they do not offer higher range of treatments to customers who pay higher premiums. Instead, the coverage is “one size fits all”, and to limit costs, covered treatments options are seriously limited compared to what private insurers offer in US, especially in countries other than the wealthiest ones: in Poland, for example, cancer treatments available to patients on government healthcare are at least a decade or two behind the state of the art. Of course, the flip side is that you then get to see how cheap health care per capita is in Poland, and gripe about outrageous costs in US.