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Private insurance companies have earned the public’s distrust. They routinely put profitability above their policyholders’ well-being. And a system of private health insurance provision also has higher administrative costs than a single-payer system, in which the government is the sole insurer.
But the avarice and inefficiencies of private insurers are not the sole — or even primary — reasons why vital medical services are often unaffordable and inaccessible in the United States. The bigger issue is that America’s health care providers — hospitals, physicians, and drug companies — charge much higher rates than their peers in other wealthy nations.
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United Health actually bought a bunch of health care providers, so they basically own a good chunk of the entire ‘vertical’ and somehow still ended up denying record amounts of claims.
What I don’t understand is why Americans are still looking to the federal government to solve the issue, instead of getting together and building a non profit co-op to deal with health care. Do the insurance part, gain market share by being the ones that actually don’t deny valid claims, start/take over hospitals, start making your own genetic medicine, etc. If you don’t have to make a profit and appease shareholders you can take over the entire market. Local/state governments could provide some of the seed capital for this and make it the ‘public option’ in that state.
The Blue Cross Blue Shield insurers are either nonprofits or mutuals (the shareholders are the policyholders). So are many smaller insurers.
But nonprofit insurers are subject to many of the same pressures as other insurers. They need to keep premiums low, and they would go bankrupt if they paid every claim.
Likewise, the vast majority of hospitals are nonprofits. But nonprofit hospitals have to pay for medicines, doctor salaries, etc too. Most are barely scraping by and can’t fund clinical trials into novel genetic medicines.
Why would hospitals need to run clinical trials? Just provide the basic health care.
Oops, I read “generic medicine” as “genetic medicine”. I thought you were suggesting that hospitals start competing with pharma over new mRNA designs!
Yeah, you don’t need a clinical trial to make generic medicine. But you do need special facilities, which most hospitals probably would be unwilling to pay for.
You’re surprised that normal people don’t just start up their own multi-billion dollar corporation with assloads of liability and assloads of government oversight?