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> who actually lead pretty decent lives. It's because the whole image is fake. In theory everything is fine but you know there is something very bad about the

> who actually lead pretty decent lives. It's because the whole image is fake. In theory everything is fine but you know there is something very bad about the healthcare system, and the power of an institution to decide about someone else's life or death is just one aspect of it; prices inflated beyond imagination is another one (these two are related). So we pretend to live normal lives but in the back of our head we pray we don't ever need to become a victim of this system. But on the outside yes, it looks like everything is fine and we have decent lives.

jml78 2y ago
I can explain my perspective which echos kinda what you say. I am in my 40s, I make pretty good money. My life is good. My mom died last year. The medical system and her medicare "advantage" plan killed her. She had a stroke. However, within a day, she was up and walking around with assistance. However, the hospital was understaffed so two things happened. She fell going to the bathroom AND after that happened, they did not get her moving enough and she got a huge bed sore. The huge bed sore would not have happened if her medicare advantage plan hadn't denied denied denied having her moved to get physical, occupation, and speech theray. If she had just good ole medicare, they would have approved it the day of request (it was requested the day after the stroke, I was warned that her plan was going to deny because they always do where medicare always approves). Instead, she rotted in an understaffed wing of the hospital for a week while I fought to get shit approved. After getting approval to be moved, she was making slow slow progress due to the bed sore. It is hard when your body needs to recover and you have a huge wound on your back. Once again her medicare "advantage" plan denied giving her more time in therapy. Guess what? Medicare would have just approved. Her advantage plan said the "community" could care for her and she could just get better over time. Do you know what that means? They wanted me to quit working and care for my mom 24/7. That is what they meant by community care. I am an only child with no other family except my wife and kids. The hospital social worker was great and refused to discharge my mom because she knew I couldn't physically move my mom around or give her the care she required. That started a month battle where her insurance was refusing to pay anymore hospital bills, refused to get her more therapy, and essentially killed my mom. If the social worker had allowed my mom to be discharged, I would have been fucked. She slowly got worse and died. The american medical system with its private "advantage" plans took what would have been a recoverable bad health incident and allowed it to kill my mom for greed. BTW, after a month of fighting, emails to the insurance board of directors and CEO, I got more therapy approved for my mom but it was too late by then. She died a few days later. You can probably guess how I feel about the CEO's murder........
- greenie_beans 2y ago
  that sounds like a true nightmare. i'm sorry that happened.
  - jml78 2y ago
    Yep, and it is preventable. The one thing I can say is NEVER let your parents sign up for a "medicare" advantage plan. There is no advantage. The company my mom was with is one of the largest and profited something like 18 BILLION off medicare last year. How do you think that is possible? Because they overcharge medicare and deny coverage.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Source? UNH’s entire net income in 2023 was $22.3B, and their market cap is more than 5x the next biggest managed care organization (MCO). The other MCOs all had net income less than $8B (CVS/Elevance/Cigna/Humana/etc). There is no way a business earned a profit of $18B just from Medicare and it not being visible on their net income figures. That is not to say Medicare Advantage is good for most customers (the common advice is to stay away from it), but fantastical numbers don’t help arguments.
      - wyre 2y ago
        Profit is not income. That $18B could be spend on salaries, bonuses, company assests, etc, and I'm not an accountant but if it's getting spent on the business it doesn't have to be included in their income reports.
        lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Profit without a qualifier is assumed to mean net income, which is all revenue minus all expenses. But even supposing that the business earns $18B from Medicare Advantage after all is said and done, it doesn’t pass the smell test because at that level of profit, these businesses should shut everything else down and just do Medicare Advantage.
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
Your description reminds me of the opening scene of Blue Velvet.
noisy_boy 2y ago
Its because the generally applicable standard way globally to know if things are bad for someone, doesn't work in US. Most people have homes, there is a car standing outside, they have clothes to wear, people are generally private (due to high focus on individualism) and unless you try, you can't really overhear your neighbour - so these issues hide behind closed doors.
blantonl 2y ago
The problem is I don't see any "easy" solution to this issue, simply because there will always be an institution in place to decide about someone else's life our death. Be it a privately run for profit insurance system that runs on perverse incentives, or a government agency that runs on power and influence and corruption.
- bendauphinee 2y ago
  The “easy” solution is to try and remove profit as much as possible from the equation. Pretty much every other high GDP country in the world has single payer healthcare. Guess how many people get told their anaesthesia won’t be covered for their full surgery. That shouldn’t even be a question, and yet the US system makes it one.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Thorrez 2y ago
    Two people I know who moved to the US from countries with single payer healthcare said that in their previous countries they would have to wait a long time for certain operations, but in the US can get them almost immediately.
    - harimau777 2y ago
      From what I understand, wait time can certainly be an issue with single payer healthcare. However, there's people in the US who have effectively infinite wait time because they can't afford treatment at all.
      - ceejayoz 2y ago
        I have an excellent insurance plan and ready access to a large US hospital system. The wait to see a dermatologist as a new patient is ~6 months. Definitely not unique to single-payer systems.
      - 2y ago
jajko 2y ago
You just described one of quite a few reasons (higher education falls into same category, overall security could be mentioned in such topic too) that I consider some parts of western Europe a better place to live and raise kids than anything US can provide. Despite having much lower numbers on paychecks alone. I get that system needs to push folks into working hard and motivate exceptional efforts (and luck), but sometimes this goes into properly bad directions where few gain and majority loses. In any functional society, all this is never isolated and it has ripple effects.
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>In theory everything is fine but you know there is something very bad about the healthcare system, No merely healthcare, but employment, housing etc. It's easy to single out healthcare for obvious reasons.
benced 2y ago
You can leave! Nothing is stopping you from staying in the US. Particularly if you're on this website, you probably have talents other countries would like to acquire. The fact that you haven't says you don't believe what you say.
- dudeinhawaii 2y ago
  The "America, love it or leave it" tactic? It's intellectually dishonest and shortcuts any kind of debate or thoughtful discussion. Or is this more of the "you haven't left your wife beating husband so you must like it" tactic? That's also philosophically bereft and avoids anything substantive. Suffice it to say, constructive criticism is vital for democratic improvement.
  - benced 2y ago
    If your belief is the United States is so bad that it justifies murder, you should leave. If you're more reasonable, I would not recommend leaving.
    - jplusequalt 2y ago
      My belief is that there are people who get what they deserve. The CEO was one of them.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
      > If your belief is the United States is so bad that it justifies murder, you should leave. That's a weird conclusion. For me, it's rather "The USA has its flaws (for me - healthcare and higher education financing above all) so we as a society should focus on fixing these problems". Killing people or leaving the country are not solutions, they are are an equivalent of short Twitter replies on a nuanced subject.
      - benced 2y ago
        I agree! I'm only suggesting leaving if you think murder is justified.

jml78 2y ago

I can explain my perspective which echos kinda what you say. I am in my 40s, I make pretty good money. My life is good. My mom died last year. The medical system and her medicare "advantage" plan killed her. She had a stroke. However, within a day, she was up and walking around with assistance. However, the hospital was understaffed so two things happened. She fell going to the bathroom AND after that happened, they did not get her moving enough and she got a huge bed sore. The huge bed sore would not have happened if her medicare advantage plan hadn't denied denied denied having her moved to get physical, occupation, and speech theray. If she had just good ole medicare, they would have approved it the day of request (it was requested the day after the stroke, I was warned that her plan was going to deny because they always do where medicare always approves). Instead, she rotted in an understaffed wing of the hospital for a week while I fought to get shit approved. After getting approval to be moved, she was making slow slow progress due to the bed sore. It is hard when your body needs to recover and you have a huge wound on your back. Once again her medicare "advantage" plan denied giving her more time in therapy. Guess what? Medicare would have just approved. Her advantage plan said the "community" could care for her and she could just get better over time. Do you know what that means? They wanted me to quit working and care for my mom 24/7. That is what they meant by community care. I am an only child with no other family except my wife and kids. The hospital social worker was great and refused to discharge my mom because she knew I couldn't physically move my mom around or give her the care she required. That started a month battle where her insurance was refusing to pay anymore hospital bills, refused to get her more therapy, and essentially killed my mom. If the social worker had allowed my mom to be discharged, I would have been fucked. She slowly got worse and died. The american medical system with its private "advantage" plans took what would have been a recoverable bad health incident and allowed it to kill my mom for greed. BTW, after a month of fighting, emails to the insurance board of directors and CEO, I got more therapy approved for my mom but it was too late by then. She died a few days later. You can probably guess how I feel about the CEO's murder........

greenie_beans 2y ago
that sounds like a true nightmare. i'm sorry that happened.
- jml78 2y ago
  Yep, and it is preventable. The one thing I can say is NEVER let your parents sign up for a "medicare" advantage plan. There is no advantage. The company my mom was with is one of the largest and profited something like 18 BILLION off medicare last year. How do you think that is possible? Because they overcharge medicare and deny coverage.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Source? UNH’s entire net income in 2023 was $22.3B, and their market cap is more than 5x the next biggest managed care organization (MCO). The other MCOs all had net income less than $8B (CVS/Elevance/Cigna/Humana/etc). There is no way a business earned a profit of $18B just from Medicare and it not being visible on their net income figures. That is not to say Medicare Advantage is good for most customers (the common advice is to stay away from it), but fantastical numbers don’t help arguments.
    - wyre 2y ago
      Profit is not income. That $18B could be spend on salaries, bonuses, company assests, etc, and I'm not an accountant but if it's getting spent on the business it doesn't have to be included in their income reports.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Profit without a qualifier is assumed to mean net income, which is all revenue minus all expenses. But even supposing that the business earns $18B from Medicare Advantage after all is said and done, it doesn’t pass the smell test because at that level of profit, these businesses should shut everything else down and just do Medicare Advantage.

BLKNSLVR 2y ago

Your description reminds me of the opening scene of Blue Velvet.

noisy_boy 2y ago

Its because the generally applicable standard way globally to know if things are bad for someone, doesn't work in US. Most people have homes, there is a car standing outside, they have clothes to wear, people are generally private (due to high focus on individualism) and unless you try, you can't really overhear your neighbour - so these issues hide behind closed doors.

blantonl 2y ago

The problem is I don't see any "easy" solution to this issue, simply because there will always be an institution in place to decide about someone else's life our death. Be it a privately run for profit insurance system that runs on perverse incentives, or a government agency that runs on power and influence and corruption.

bendauphinee 2y ago
The “easy” solution is to try and remove profit as much as possible from the equation. Pretty much every other high GDP country in the world has single payer healthcare. Guess how many people get told their anaesthesia won’t be covered for their full surgery. That shouldn’t even be a question, and yet the US system makes it one.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Thorrez 2y ago
  Two people I know who moved to the US from countries with single payer healthcare said that in their previous countries they would have to wait a long time for certain operations, but in the US can get them almost immediately.
  - harimau777 2y ago
    From what I understand, wait time can certainly be an issue with single payer healthcare. However, there's people in the US who have effectively infinite wait time because they can't afford treatment at all.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      I have an excellent insurance plan and ready access to a large US hospital system. The wait to see a dermatologist as a new patient is ~6 months. Definitely not unique to single-payer systems.
    - 2y ago

jajko 2y ago

You just described one of quite a few reasons (higher education falls into same category, overall security could be mentioned in such topic too) that I consider some parts of western Europe a better place to live and raise kids than anything US can provide. Despite having much lower numbers on paychecks alone. I get that system needs to push folks into working hard and motivate exceptional efforts (and luck), but sometimes this goes into properly bad directions where few gain and majority loses. In any functional society, all this is never isolated and it has ripple effects.

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

>In theory everything is fine but you know there is something very bad about the healthcare system, No merely healthcare, but employment, housing etc. It's easy to single out healthcare for obvious reasons.

benced 2y ago

You can leave! Nothing is stopping you from staying in the US. Particularly if you're on this website, you probably have talents other countries would like to acquire. The fact that you haven't says you don't believe what you say.

dudeinhawaii 2y ago
The "America, love it or leave it" tactic? It's intellectually dishonest and shortcuts any kind of debate or thoughtful discussion. Or is this more of the "you haven't left your wife beating husband so you must like it" tactic? That's also philosophically bereft and avoids anything substantive. Suffice it to say, constructive criticism is vital for democratic improvement.
- benced 2y ago
  If your belief is the United States is so bad that it justifies murder, you should leave. If you're more reasonable, I would not recommend leaving.
  - jplusequalt 2y ago
    My belief is that there are people who get what they deserve. The CEO was one of them.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
    > If your belief is the United States is so bad that it justifies murder, you should leave. That's a weird conclusion. For me, it's rather "The USA has its flaws (for me - healthcare and higher education financing above all) so we as a society should focus on fixing these problems". Killing people or leaving the country are not solutions, they are are an equivalent of short Twitter replies on a nuanced subject.
    - benced 2y ago
      I agree! I'm only suggesting leaving if you think murder is justified.