Government vs. Corporate Bureaucrats

[Joanne98]

Bob Bourque of Los Alamos writes:

Do I want government bureaucrats deciding on my health care? You bet I do! Because the other choice is to have corporate bureaucrats deciding on my health care. I have some control over the government bureaucrats: I can vote out their bosses who tell them what to do. I have no control over the corporate bureaucrats. They can do what they please, and pay off politicians to stay out of the way.

Government bureaucrats will charge a few percent for the administrative work they would do, which is like what they do for Social Security and Medicare. Corporate bureaucrats now charge 30% to pay their CEOs hundreds of millions of dollars and billions to their investors.

"Health care" companies do not do health care. They simply collect premiums from us, get the bills from doctors and hospitals, decide how much they are going to pay, and pay it. They are just pass-throughs. And they skim that 30% right off the top while doing it. Of course they are going to fight tooth-and-nail against a government-run health plan: It would make them irrelevant and put them out of business. And of course they don't want to give up that cushy gravy train.

In all the talk-show bickering, these simple facts above are being obscured. The health care companies don't care about us. Like all corporations, they are in it to make money. And what an easy way to do it. Why should their ease and comfort be at our expense? Get rid of these corporate bureaucrats and let health care be run by people we have control over - our elected officials.

http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2009/09/commentology-government-vs-corporate-bureaucrats.html

[krispos42]

1. At this point the insurance industry is low-risk, which should mean low-reward

It's a mature industry. They make it needlessly complex then profit from the complexity.


What they are doing was being done in ancient Sumer 2,000 years before Jesus was born, and they did it with clay tablets and an abacus.

There's no insurance-related innovation left in the industry; all the innovation goes to finding new and exciting ways to not pay people: retroactive policy cancellation, "pre-existing conditions", networks, etc.