I could go for that.
Only about half of Americans want Universal health care anyway.
I remember the TV commercials, personally.
That would be great! Especially for those who live in MA.
A higher % of insured people is better than the alternative, but it still leaves people having to deal with companies like this. Which leads to people having to “deal” with companies like this.
I didn’t say anything about politics or universal health care, that was somebody else.
However, as a for-profit health insurance company it’s their job to kill people. To extract as much in the way of money from people as possible while avoiding paying out as much benefits as possible, with the hopes that the victim will die before payment as necessary. If the CEO wasn’t killing people, then he wasn’t doing his job.
Count another one who requires evidence of current or recent, say even within Thompson’s tenure, of lobbying against universal healthcare.
Reality check for you: at this point in time there are no credible movements to single payor. There is a drive to get closer to universal healthcare coverage; that’s what the subsidized ACA market is aimed to achieve. The insurance industry is NOT against that as it puts larger numbers of presumed healthy individuals into their panels. They lobby against all sorts of regulations I am sure, and with harms to consumers as a result, but they would also lobby hard against having larger numbers of uninsured. They want the big customer volume. The closer to universal the better as long as they provide the bulk of the coverage at a workable to comfortable margin.
Medicare for all? Medicare increasingly goes through them too. Expanding to a bigger younger base for their Medicare Advantage plans. Gold mine!
It is insane to me than in one breath you are asking me to find proof that insurance companies lobbied against universal healthcare and the next you talk about how we are getting closer to a system that directly benefits insurance companies.
It’s also fairly irrelevant what their position on universal health care/single payer/whatever is. If we’re talking about what they have been doing what matters is the present and past system, not some future hypothetical one.
That’s really not true.
There are several ways that insurance companies increase profits. They can take in more premium. They can operate more efficiently. And yes, they can deny claims. But “paying claims” is the product that an insurance company sells. In the p&c world (where individuals buy their own insurance, instead of having it picked by their employer) there are companies that compete to having the lowest price, and others that compete to have the best service. And others that compete by writing harder-to-underwrite risks, like a homeowners insurance company that has the expertise to look at your old knob-and-tube wiring and determine whether it’s in good shape and safe to use.
And yes, if you buy the cheapest possible insurance, you may have more trouble getting them to pay claims. But if they never paid claims, no one would buy the product. And personal insurance is highly regulated. If they never paid claims, they wouldn’t even be allowed to sell insurance.
No insurance company is trying to avoid paying all claims, or hoping their customers all die before collecting. All insurance companies want to avoid over-paying. No insurance company wants to kill you, not even the ones that sell annuities.
I think if all our insurance were sold to individuals instead of to employers, and if health providers were required to have transparent pricing, we’d be a long way towards solving our health insurance problems. Neither of those goals is advanced by murdering insurance CEOs.
I didn’t say that I excluded them. In this case I noted how a lot of right wingers did say to several right wing influences that they are not amused by the influencers trying to gaslight many as before.
They want results in the lowering of prices, including healthcare costs as they mostly voted for.
IMHO, the high prices and complete lack of “reading the room” from insurers will not be forgotten as usual.
Universal healthcare <> single payer healthcare.
I have not seen any evidence that the guy who was murdered lobbied against either. But it’s insane to me that posters here are asking for proof that the health insurance industry lobbied against universal healthcare. Don’t you all remember Harry and Louise? Who do you think paid for those ads?
Not understanding what you fail to grasp. Everyone covered by insurance would be universal healthcare coverage and would be loved by the insurance companies.
Are you thinking that universal coverage and single payer are synonymous? They aren’t. And there is no need to lobby against single payer right now.
Trump may try to repeal the ACA which result in many more uninsured, getting farther from universal coverage. The insurance companies would likely lobby against that. They want more lower risk folk in their pools.
Not really; the “product” they sell is the lie that they’ll pay claims. They are going to be very unhappy any time they are forced to actually do so.
I’ve worked for an insurance company. I worked in the claims department of an insurance company for a while. I sat with claims adjusters. They are rated on how well they pay claims. Part of that is paying claims quickly, and having satisfied customers.
I was in an personal auto insurance group, not a health insurance group. Many of our claimants were our direct customers. But even for the liability claims (where the people we were paying weren’t our insureds) we wanted to pay those claims. My job was to predict how much we’d pay. No one wanted that number to be zero. We’d be out of business.
Again, if we bought our own insurance, and we were the customers, we’d be in much better shape. But even HR actually does care that their employees get their healthcare paid for.
I don’t think anyone here is arguing that they had never. But this is on relevance to way Thompson’s execution was somehow “understandable” … as absurd to obscene as that argument would be if there was active lobbying against single payer right now, it is more absurd when there has been no need for any during Thompson’s entire tenure, and those ads long predate his time. He had zero culpability for them.
No, it is not. In fact, they dont want to kill people, since dead people dont pay premium, and also the lawsuits get expensive.
Now, we have gone from Thompson murdered thousands to UHC murdered thousands to the healthcare industry as a whole, to they killed thousands due to their politcal leanings to now- it’s their job. 
Right.
wiki says-
Harry and Louise" was a $14 to $20 million year-long television advertising campaign funded by the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA) Back in 1993.
You know who graduated from High School in 1993?
Brian Thompson
He wasnt even CEO until 2021. It seems a little unfair to blame him for what what occuring back when he was in high school.
Yep.
This is not true. I was an actuary in 1993 for a small insurance company, when Clinton proposed (basically) the same thing as the ACA, and we got the “Harry and Louise” commercials paid for by the insurance industry. I had to study the possible effects. My position, at the time, was that it would be a boon to the industry - more members, more profit. Their problem at the time was that they would be forced to take everyone. I thought that attitude would be fixed with the ACA and the bonus pool. It was to be funded by the $2000 penalty on people who refused insurance. The pool would cover losses by companies on the public (individual) option. Then the Republicans removed the pool.
With group health insurance, you can predict overall costs pretty well. Individual policies, on the other hand, have HUGE variations on potential claims. If you can charge more based on weight, pre-existing conditions, family history, etc., you can still make a profit on a block of business. Remove those adjustments, and you have to increase premiums. Now you are being selected against.
Bottom line - profits go down. Can’t have that, so the industry is against it. They are so used to being able to select their customers, they are deathly afraid of not being able to.
Seems to me that the only product most companies sell these days is “perpetual growth”.
The industry as a group signed on to and supported the ACA, once the public option was removed. When Trump first term tried to repeal the ACA they lobbied against the appeal, albeit without much vigor. Yes there are tricky bits about being in the individual marketplace but in recent years plan participation has grown dramatically. That is probably the best measure of what they think.
To be fair, looking stuff up a group including several vested healthcare interests, including some of the insurance industry, did lobby hard against Medicare for All. Although that said, the big insurance player in that effort was not UHC - it was BC BS.
But that’s why they opposed it in the first place: The public option was the only way to provide any meaningful competition to the health insurance companies and keep them honest about their profits. They didn’t want any meaningful competition.
Khrushchev: The difference between the Soviet Union and China is that I rose from the peasant class, while you come from the privileged mandarin class.
Zhou Enlai: True. But there is this similarity. Each of us is a traitor to his class.