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Comment by Noaidi | Hacker News Reader

> healthcare sector is not nearly as corrupt or shackled by a huge amount of government regulation

Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.

And regulation is lacking in Health Insurance and enforcement is lacking in healthcare. (So many doctors that have committed malpractice just switch hospitals.

> U.S. healthcare is doomed by its vast spiraling costs even after controlling for its supposedly higher quality.

Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

So please stop with these right wing baby bird food regurgitation.

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> Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.

There’s a crazy amount of corruption in the healthcare space. Some of the medical fraud busts that come out every year have staggeringly large sums attached. In some areas there are still schemes that openly recruit poor people to use their information to bill for medical care that is not actually necessary or provided. It’s wild.

> Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

Sorry, the world isn’t so simple that you can pick your villains (insurance companies and private equity) and declare everyone else to be free from blame. There’s a lot of bad behavior in these systems at every level. Yes, including some doctors.

If we removed insurance overhead entirely, your healthcare costs wouldn’t change more than a few percent. It’s amazing that everyone united against insurance companies as the cause of high healthcare costs when they barely take a few percent of the overall spend.

> Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

It is actually the opposite.

UnitedHealth, one of the 'worst' insurers in terms of denials, has a profit margin of ~5% [0]. It is mainly the providers that overcharge, under the guise of "the less and lower we bill, the less and lower insurance pays us".

Insurance only works if there is at least as much going into the pot as is going out. What do you think would happen if insurances weren't denial hawks?

Get angry at your doctor for overcharging you whilst using insurance companies as the heel.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-g...

The reason UnitedHealth has such a low profit margin is that their profit margin is capped by the ACA's Medical Loss Ratio provision. They fraudulently get diagnoses for their insured patients to upcode and incur more charges to Medicare Advantage that they can collect their profit from. Any doctor could have told you this has been going on for years. https://www.google.com/search?q=UnitedHealthmedicare+advanta...

If the government were the insurer, it would not have the same incentives to commit this fraud.

As a person who moved to US from Europe recently I can say that prices charged by US healthcare providers are ridiculous - all overpriced 10-20x compared to my home country.

> Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.

¿Por qué no los dos? Guess what, it's a lot more likely that insurance companies will go corrupt if what they interact with - healthcare - is corrupt.

> private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

Guess what is limiting private equity's ability to compete amongst themselves in expanding the effective provision of healthcare and driving costs lower for the ultimate stakeholders i.e. patients? That's right: doctors, hospitals (including those that are nominally not-for-profit, but where the profits just turn into salary for those who can control that flow of money) and government regulation throughout the sector.

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