How anyone stays alive and wealthy in such a system is beyond me. Very few, apparently, are fortunate enough to enjoy this. We need to completely rethink this entire model.
The core situation isn't specific to healthcare either: Someone's offering you a long-term contract service based on the strength of a menu of available services and options, but their offering is effectively fake.
It's a similar concept to subscribing to a mostly-fake library of repair manuals or something, only the popular/cheap ones are there, and the others are permanently temporarily unavailable.
Hold up (seriously hold up and stop serially editing your comments), where did I say it did?
> It's a similar concept
The government has decided, without much input from actual citizens, that copyright should exist for life plus 70 years. Government interference in copyright has created the fraudulent market conditions you've just related.
We can do this all day if you like.
So directing the ire at "government" seems like it's directly detracting from focusing on the problem, which is a complete lack of sensible regulation of these "private" corporate extraction machines. At a minimum this "network" nonsense needs to be outright banned for the restraint of trade scheme that it is, and "providers" need to be taken to task for shaking down patients with fraudulent bills not based on any sort of contract (the latter being the main thing driving people into the arms of these "insurers" to begin with).
No it hasn't. People will happily take cash. Some of the offices called in this article suggested they only took patients who pay cash.
And why is your criticism reserved for the government and not the perpetrator of the fraud, namely Ambetter?
Health insurance shouldn’t exist. When the government mandates it, now there are two problems. If this wasn’t obvious prior to the ACA, I have a bridge to sell you.
0 - https://ballotpedia.org/Changes_in_Net_Worth_of_U.S._Senator...
Here in the UK our NHS is a goddamn mess, it's cracking and creaking and bureaucratic, but every American expat i have ever known who now lives in the UK has horror stories about how much worse it is over there. In our monthly social classes (PSHCE) we watched documentaries of poor Americans unable to afford healthcare, and it horrified us all.
You can't run healthcare as a profit seeking enterprise, it just doesn't work, the financial incentives of healthcare providers just fundamentally do not align with their customers. Government run institutions can often fall into a state of bureaucratic atrophy but if this and countless other stories make clear - that's an issue with institutions in general, whether they be government run or not.
This problem will not improve until you get over your ideological commitment to trying to solve every problem with markets. Healthcare must be socialised, anything less is barbarism.
Healthcare hasn’t been a “market” in decades. It’s completely captured by monopolies which have captured regulation to prevent any alternatives. I do know that the mashup of government mandates for for-profit entities is about as corrupt a system as could be conceived.
It wasn't nearly as corrupt.
> we watched documentaries of poor Americans unable to afford healthcare, and it horrified us all.
A system so good shouldn't need such propaganda to justify it's existence.
> you get over your ideological commitment
The ideological commitment that are the underpinnings of our system of government and the core of our very constitution? Why don't you just "get over" your ideological commitment to entertaining that absurd royal family?
We watched videos of the horrors of the American healthcare system for the same reason as we watched videos and were otherwise taught about oppressive regimes, international poverty, bigotry and racism both local and international - to learn about global issues, to gain a wider perspective on the world, to be knowledgeable about the many ways in which a society can fail it's most vulnerable. Such as, for instance, letting your poor die and suffer from preventable, curable illnesses.
Oh, and I have no such ideological commitment to the monarchy, I and most people I know would choose to abolish it in a heartbeat. It is here, as it is everywhere, the conservative right clinging onto traditions, ideologies and policies that have long since proven unproductive, disfunctional or outright harmful.
The monarchy may well underpin much of how British law and government works, and that is something we should work to change - just as you in the US should work to change those parts of your founding constitution written almost 300 years ago that no are no longer to the benefit of yourselves and your country.
No, they didn't. People with unusual medical needs just died. Heck, people with what we now view as pretty routine medical needs just died.
Many states now cap malpractice insurance. Also, malpractice insurance is not as crippling to physicians as some would have you believe.
That is sarcasm if you can't tell.
As someone that used the open market plans before the ACA, it basically changed nothing, added subsidies, and removed the lifetime limits, at least from my perspective.
But this is all pointless accounting bullshit, we simply need a medicare-for-all plan.
0 - https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
Fucking Joe Lieberman.
Granted, whenever democrats are in power, they rotate the "bad guy" to give in to the corporate demands and side with the Republicans, but Joe Lieberman was the reason we got a washed out reformed healthcare. Sure it could have been some other democrat senator turncoat, but he wasn't being the surreptitious underminer while the Republicans did the public PR, that a-hole was front and center hollowing out the ACA.
Joe Lieberman probably killed hundreds of thousands of Americans as a result. Maybe a million. Maybe more.