Thank you.
It’s like this is happening in a vacumn in the USA, like universal health care hasn’t existed in 20 or more developed countries for 50-100 years.
It’s a first-world system with first-world solutions. People in every other developed country vote to maintain universal healthcare at every election, decade after decade.
Really, it’s a clue.
Well, we fucked up, we overestimated the intelligence and wisdom of our people. We tried to win by presenting a reasonable and sensible proposal in a reasonable and sensible manner. Our opposition deftly ouflanked us by screaming lies at the top of their lungs. We should have presented the opposition as running dog jackals of the greedy insurance companies and their dark and evil minions.
That this is largely true would have been a bonus.
Yeah, but the big question is, was that intentional?
Buried in this Assessing the Effects of Foster Care: Findings from the Casey National Alumni Study - Casey Family Programs is the story of a kid who died at 18 after he aged out of foster care lost access to health care, and no longer had access to the insulin to treat his type 1 diabetes. (talk about three strikes)
This Dr. Doctors Say Health Care Rationing Already Exists : NPR talks about the 33 year old woman with a hemorrhagic stroke they worked on in an emergency room for 90 minutes. She had been choosing to buy food for her children instead of her blood pressure meds. The cost of that unsuccessful attempt to save her life would have paid for several peoples blood pressure medications for life.
Those are two.
I do think the Dems need to grow a spine, but at this point the Republicans have drawn such a completely ridiculous line in the sand against any change whatsoever, that if anything gets through that people on the ground perceive helps them the Repubs have lost big. I liken it to all the times my generation was told grossly exaggerated things about marijuana, and all it took was one kid to try it and we all believed everything they told us was a lie.
According to this http://www.emaxhealth.com/2/124/33290/california-insurers-deny-21-claims.html 20% of all medical claims are denied by California’s biggest private insurers, even when when the physician recommended the treatments.
Oh and from that article I also will add 17 old Nataline Sarkisyan who needed a liver transplant. Her insurance company denied the treatment until just hours before she died. Also Nick Colombo who’s insurance company played the same game with a treatment for bone cancer that has been highly effective in other people. They said no until there was a lot of public outcry, then reversed themselves when it was too late.
The question I would love to have answered: can insurance companies make a profit without pulling this shit? If they can, but don’t, then they are some of the worst criminals in the history of our country, preying upon the weak and lawyerless.
And if they can’t survive and make a decent profit without this shit, what fucking good are they?
To be trite, it’s capitalism; it’s not moral, it’s not immoral, it’s amoral. The goal isn’t care, it’s maximising profit.
You can’t blame people for that, you can blame the politicians for accepting the money that has allowed the absurdity to continue decades after the rest of the developed world saw the reality.
It is the longest most successful con in the era of democracy.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/healthcare/2002-05-22-insurance-deaths.htm This estimate says 1800 people a year die due to a lack of health care.
Insurance companies have corporate morality, which is none. They will do everything they can do to maximize profits. Execs need huge salaries and bonuses don’t you know? They fight competition and fight the customers. That is a successful corporate profit model. It is not an efficient or reasonable delivery system for health care.
There’s probably no way to measure the people who didn’t seek preventative care because they can’t afford doctor’s office visits (or could afford one if they knew they had malignant melanoma, but obviously they didn’t know that and they didn’t go). But I’m sure a lot of people do die because they don’t get moles checked, or can’t afford a sleep study (my boyfriend I KNOW has sleep apnea - he also has no insurance. That can take years off your life even if it doesn’t kill you in one fell swoop.)
The thread was about dying. If you add in the suffering ,those living in pain and fear because they can’t get help. the numbers are far bigger. It is a heartless system that exists to enrich the carriers.
We all know corporations exist to make greater and greater profits. That concept is why they should not be in charge of health care. Their mandate is not to deliver the best care at the best price. They will gobble up the competition and fight the customer to death. What a stupid way to deliver health care.
I read that story yesterday. It’s even worse than it sounds, because Aetna is down around 9%, so the other companies are in the 30s.
The insurance companies interviewed say that they get around to paying sometime. A certain percentage is from mistakes, so the system is a bit broken. But not that much.
Another way it may be worse: my personal count is about 1 - 5%. But my company is self-insured, so the insurance company has no incentive to turn my claims down. I bet it is even worse for people who have to buy their own.
Same question, over and over, rears its ugly, ugly head: if they can make a decent profit without pulling this shit, why don’t they? And if they can’t, what fucking good are they?
I could probably find it if I dug long enough, but I recall a case in the news from the Big Island of Hawaii where a guy died from an abscessed tooth. Since Hawaii is supposed to be such a big health-care state, there was some degree of shame in the guy dying. But it could have been he was just some poor yokel who did not know exactly where he could have gone for assistance and so waited too long to find out.
I’m assuming that by significantly you mean statistically significant. Let me just point out that since this is dealing with data on the aggregate level, and not from a randomly selected sample of a population, statistic significance is perfectly meaningless. ‘There’s 34 countries with higher life expectancy’, is all you can say, nothing else. You can’t soften the blow by bringing in statistics.
it’s not like other countries don’t get immigrants/guest workers/ refugees in large numbers? This hardly sets the US apart from a whole bunch of other countries in the industrialized world.
Because, they are not a charity and the competitive pressure is not there to force them to do so.
We all (almost) accept that corporations are supposed to maximize profits. It is not that they can not make a ton of money, it is that they can make more by cheating.
Relevant CNN article: 45,000 American deaths associated with lack of insurance - CNN.com
Granted, these are all ‘probablies.’ However, the most salient fact for me is that people without health insurance in the US have a 40% higher chance of dying. It reminds me of cigarettes and lung cancer. With any particular case of lung cancer, you can never say for sure if smoking caused it. However, the numbers in the aggregate are staggering.
My question is more focused on “reforming” the insurance providers. If we can reform them, and they stay in business and actually provide a service, then I’m open to hearing about it. What that means, of course, is that they didn’t have to do it but did it anyway. Greed, in other words.
But if it is a matter of survival, that they cannot make a legitimate profit without resorting to murder by spreadsheet, then I say they’re spinach, and I say to hell with them!
I admit this is not much of a cite, but I recall a Doonesbury cartoon one long-ago Sunday that had to do with smoking. Garry Trudeau pointed out that a doctor in the early part of the 20th century had excitedly written about a death from lung cancer he was able to investigate, because in those pre-cigarette days it was such a rare disease to find. In a footnote, he claimed it was a true detail. I’ve not been able to find that, though.