Whether or not the killer was motivated by a personal experience with United, the numerous posts referenced people’s rage at the health insurance industry.
Should we be surprised?
Recent years have seen health insurance rates soar and out-of-pocket costs skyrocket. Even those with employer-provided health insurance are often unable to pay for needed care as deductibles and copays keep rising.
At the same time, the industry has had one black eye after another, with multiple insurers in the news.
Private health insurance companies offering Medicare Advantage plans routinely overstate the health problems of their enrollees to get unjustified extra payments from the government.
A former Aetna medical director admitted under oath that he never looked at patients’ records when deciding whether to approve or deny care but simply rubber-stamped the nurse reviewers’ decisions.
United was castigated by a Senate committee for using algorithms to deny care and it was noted that the denial rate for rehab care after hospitalization rose from 10.9% in 2020 to 22.7% in 2022.
Denying care is good for insurers’ profits, and these profits flow into executive salaries. The CEOs of America’s six largest health insurers took home a total of $122,970,614 in total compensation in 2023.
Taking money from employers and individuals and paying medical bills is not rocket science and does not warrant sky-high profits. Medicare operates with an overhead of about 3% while private insurers charge 15% or more.
As I document in my book, some 25% of U.S. “health care” expenditure does not go to health care but to administrative overhead.
We need to get the excess profits out of health insurance companies and put that money towards patient care.
Shooting one CEO will not change the culture. We must hold our legislators’ feet to the fire and get the excess profits out of health insurance, whether at the state or the federal level.
Prescription for Bankruptcy. Buy the book on Amazon
Thank you for standing up against this anarchistic murder. I have to part company in regard to your apparent anti-profit position. Profit is value-creation. But we can argue that separately, at some other time. The main thing is to condemn the murder, as we both do.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that 5-10% of Medicare dollars for "medicare advantage" goes to investments by denying care and the profits of the insurers tells all that giving greater control to "for-profit" entities does not improve the health of our nation, but rather the pocketbooks of those running them and the shareholders.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't follow the first sentence of the "Just a person" comment, but I must disagree with the idea that someone or something "gives control" to insurers or to anyone: the freedom to seek the best price one can for one's services is not "given" or granted. It's not a permission but a right. (A right is a moral principle stating one's area of freedom.)
DeleteOne's right to live one's life as one sees fit includes the freedom to engage in voluntary contractual agreements with others to trade goods and services. And in those trades, buyer and seller each have the right to ask whatever terms they wish. If they reach agreement, each side expects to profit by the transaction.
In free, uncoerced exchange, the gains achieved by each are proper and just, whether or not the gain is called "profit."
But healthcare has extensive government interference in what should be voluntary exchange. Government doesn't function by asking and waiting for agreement; government dictates coercively.
Despite huge government involvement in medicine you don't have to patronize United Healthcare. But that involvement has greatly bureaucratized medicine and squashed real competition, limiting our choices as buyers.
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ReplyDeleteA great fallacy is considering health care as just another commodity, like buying a car or picking a cell phone plan. In the vast majority of cases, there is not a parity between "buyer" (the patient or family) and the "seller" (the hospital or doctor). The patient is generally going to do what the medical professional advises, so thinking of this as a freely-entered contract is rarely accurate.
ReplyDeleteI understand the point of Dr. Hoffer's previous comment and it has a certain validity: the buyer cannot judge the offered product as easily as he can for commodities, like shirts or cars. But I don't see it as supporting the conclusion that the contract isn't freely entered: one chooses to follow the doctor's advice or not. I, for instance, have carefully selected my doctor, and I get second (or third) opinions on the big issues.
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