Health insurance companies are useless. Get rid of them.

[Zorro]

The most perplexing aspect of our current debate over healthcare and health coverage is the notion that Americans love their health insurance companies.

This bizarre idea surfaced most recently in the hand-wringing over proposals to do away with private coverage advocated by some of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for president. Oddly, this position has been treated as a vote-loser.

During the first round of televised debates on July 30 and 31, only four of the 20 candidates raised their hands when asked if they would ban private insurers as part of their proposals for universal coverage: Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Kamala Harris of California, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Harris later backed away, releasing a “Medicare for all” proposal that would accommodate private insurers at least for the first 10 years.

She should have stood her ground. The truth is that private health insurers have contributed nothing of value to the American healthcare system. Instead, they have raised costs and created an entitled class of administrators and executives who are fighting for their livelihoods, using customers’ premium dollars to do so.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-05/health-insurance-useless

[Auggie]

1. Useless? How about greedy, uncaring, murderous?

[BigmanPigman]

2. That perfectly describes them as well as

the entire GOP mentality.

[Auggie]

3. You know, there's really no difference between Anthem and Monsanto

[BigmanPigman]

4. I can't get any except Blue Shield to accept the ACA with tax credits.

I have been getting tossed off of Health Insurers' lists for 8 years due to preexisting conditions and they don't accept subsidies....greedy bastards are getting 33% of my fixed income and that doesn't include copays, meds, deductibles, etc.

[procon]

5. Insurance companies are owned by investors

who demand more money. This additional cost comes on top of other unnecessary expenses like high administrative fees and advertising.

The only way to get more money is to raise rates and reduce medical services. The patient is always going to be the loser in any for profit business. Universal healthcare, single payer, Medicare for all, any not for profit plan would be better.

[moose65]

8. Serious question here....

Are there any non-profit health insurance companies? Companies that have no investors and don’t pay their CEOs millions? There are plenty of non-profit hospitals. Seems like there would be a niche for non-profit health insurers.

[procon]

11. There are plenty on non profit hospitals.

These are publically owned hosp facilities, including the one in my town, and like those big state university medical centers affliatted with medical schools.

There are public clinics under whole or partially (think Planned Parenthood) funded by state or city services that take Medicaid patients or uninsured.

But insurance, I'd say not very likely they'd be that philanthropic. Those companies need a large source of steady revenues to stay in business to pay medical costs of subscribers. They depend on investor money and they want to see a profit for their investment.

[mwooldri]

13. Only one I know of for sure is the UK's NHS.

But then the NHS is owned by the people... and the "CEO" of NHS England makes $250-$300k a year. The CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) made at least 60 times this. The BCBS system covers 106 million people, about twice that of NHS England. Plus BCBS is made up of lots of different insurers, so their CEOs probably receive a big pay packet too.

Admittedly going from a private health insurance system to 100% government will mean job losses in claims processing and render a lot of careers obsolete. I would suggest that if the USA goes this way then there would need to be something to ease the impact of this change to the ordinary private health insurance worker who would see a huge part of their industry disappear almost overnight.

[Bradshaw3]

6. There are several DU posters who disagree

Whenever a healthcare debate comes up, they post about awful Medicare is and how people don't want to lose their "great" private healthcare insurance.

Funny thing is, I thought we had this debate in 2008 during the primary when pretty much everyone agreed we needed to do somehting about our broken system that caused millions to go bankrupt and more to die because they couldn't afford premiums, co-pays, deductibles, etc and did without.

I'm 65 and my experience has been that Medicare and a supplemental is way better than any private insurance alone I ever had, including the ACA private insurance, and much better than most durign my working career.

[JenniferJuniper]

7. People who think their private insurance is great

have never had to use it for anything but routine stuff.

They often find out too late how bad it really is.

[Auggie]

9. They could be posting on behalf of insurance companies too

[Bradshaw3]

10. Speaking truth there

That's what does people in, when they have something catastrophic happen, then get the bills and the whole lousy process of fighting with the insurance company and oftentimes ending in bankruptcy begins.

[yellowdogintexas]

12. and Amen to that!

I spent my working life as a medical claims analyst. Some of the companies I worked for sold junk insurance and our 'underground' motto for the plans were "you don't know what you've got until you use it"

We had per diagnosis deductible plans, FFS. Say you saw the doctor for a sinus infection, and then a couple of weeks later you break your arm. Guess what? New deductible for that arm. Meanwhile, your sinusitis is worse and you have a cough. Your claims come in with a diagnosis of pneumonia. Now if this is within 6 months of the original sinusitis claim a sharp claims analyst would link the two together but quite often the two diagnoses would be separated and two deductibles would be collected. I can't tell you how many adjustments I had to make in an account because too many deductibles were charged when diagnoses could be linked

Maternity only covered if you bought a rider
Chemo only covered by a rider
annual caps on coverage; lifetime caps,
No coverage for birth control
SO much more,

[Skittles]

14. they probably work in the health insurance industry

[Bradshaw3]

15. I've wondered that very same thing

Figured I would get alerted on if I dared ask. One of them used some insider lingo to diss Medicare in a post that made me think of the Reagan scares about socalized medicine in Britain. I think if they do work in the industry they should, out of transparency and honesty with their fellow DUers, let us know that.