Deny and delay: The practices fueling anger at U.S. health insurers
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I also couldn't wrap my head around why they didn't just pay whatever they thought it was worth and let me cover the rest.
Because nothing is forcing them to do so. If you don’t like it, what are you going to do about it? Shoot their CEO or something? They have all the leverage.
You dying and zero being paid out by the insurance company is the best profit margin they can ask for, that's the entire goal of an insurance company at this point.
This presents it's own set of tradeoffs, namely between decreasing premiums to attract subscribers, and what is covered, to keep subscribers happy.
for instance, I may be negotiating my salary and get to mutually-agreeable amount X. I can then say I do not want to be covered by your health insurance but in lieu of that I need my salary to be X+$30,000 to cover the cost of the health insurance I will purchase myself for my family. the company of course can say yay or nay on that but this is the avenue one can explore to get around this company-provided-HI nonsense.
Subscribers are never happy, it’s very expensive and fails to cover many things. But what choice is there? Don’t get coverage and hope you don’t get sick? Often times you don’t even get a choice… the company decides what plan and such you can get. So no, there’s no incentive to do the right thing other than the potential loss of corporate customers (which don’t have the same incentive as individuals) or potential lawsuits.
Because insurance would then just lowball the cost of everything.
Insurance needs to either do what they say they do, cover x% of procedure cost with a maximum yearly deductible or we need to be talking about why we have insurance in the first place.
We need new regulations around health and insurance. Ideally, public insurance.
They do. Many, many billable items are priced to the limit that insurance will pay. Insurance and providers have agreements on the prices they can charge for certain procedures or supplies.
It used to be the norm that insurance would pay their maximum and leave the rest to you. Sometimes the provider would waive the difference, sometimes it was billed to you.
The cost of healthcare is 100% an artefact of insurance price fixing and absolutely nothing else.
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The single reason that it is able to do this is that these outlets were not held to legal account for doing the same thing surrounding George Floyd.
At least they aren't allowing their January 6th rhetoric to cloud their journalistic vision.
There is no "anger at US Health insurers" that is new. Or is otherwise beyond the anger at the way the system is forced to balance itself in any other arena in which fees, costs, and profit are always in relative flux and people can't get it all.
The only novelty in this anger is that someone was murdered and now the Washington Post has declared the murderers issue to be sanctified. Which is exactly what you aren't supposed to do, or at least when you aren't supposed to do it, when you don't want to be seen to be supporting domestic terrorism.
The insurance industry sucks, but it sucks by its nature. Its not "broken" nor widely exploited except in the notion that its existence is a corrupt economic act.
But its current detractors wouldn't dare be rid of it. Oh no, it isn't that bad. And yet, we are in another period of being harangued with direct and indirect sympathies for murder.