Insurance companies add zero value to the delivery of health care. They're a significant cost factor that sucks up 31 percent of every dollar spent on medical services that has been rising steadily year after year.
Blue Cross Blue Shield and America's Health Insurance have offered to phase out the practice of varying premiums based on health status in the individual market.
Medicare is efficient. Only 3.6 percent of Medicare's budget goes to administrative costs, compared to 31 percent for health care delivered through private insurance plans, its clients like it, and doctors and hospitals accept it.
They spend so much money trying to not pay claims to the point where it is beyond ludicrous.
If the five big U.S. private insurers were efficient, they would be spending only about $7 billion a year on non-medical costs. In other words, they are wasting nearly $30 billion a year on functions that do little to promote the physical well being of their subscribers. In fact, a large portion of the waste represents their efforts to reduce care and thereby raise profits, all totaled more than $8 billion last year despite a economic recession.
A great deal of the waste among private insurers reflects the huge work force more than 200,000 at the top five firms they employ to operate their immense money machine. Imagine how much better our system would be if those 200,000 people were retrained to be healthcare providers rather than deniers, then the billions in wasteful spending went toward lowering premiums and improving care.
Medicare-for-all is best corporate bailout. It would save every U.S. corporation $6,000 per employee per year, but that's exactly what the insurance industry doesn't want. They like their big free-market profits. And at the same time and happily accepting more and more of our money.
As you know, under single-payer healthcare system hospitals, doctors, etc would remain the same; the government would merely replace the health insurance companies that we rightly target as wasteful, inefficient, greedy, and corrupt.
Fifteen percent of 306 million of Americans totaling 46 million need to get medical attention and simply cannot afford it.
America spends more on healthcare than Canada, true. Both on a per-capita basis and as a percentage of GDP (OECD Health Data 2008).
The U.S. spent 15.3 percent of GDP on health care in that year; Canada spent 10 percent. In 2006, 70 percent of health care spending in Canada was financed by government, versus 46 percent in the United States. Total government spending per capita in the U.S. on health care was 23 percent higher than Canadian government spending (Wikipedia).
One distinction that it is important to emphasize: Single-payer is not anywhere near the same as national healthcare (which we would support). It is merely the government acting as the clearinghouse for the collection (our low premiums) and distribution of payments for health insurance and care.
I would love to see all profits ultimately taken out of healthcare, but for now I would settle for getting rid of the parasitic health insurers.
It's not going to be perfect. But sitting around and being part of the "no club" finds no solution.
If the government told you to get a screening and found out you had a disease (cancer) caught in time, how thankful would you be? It could be your mother, father, brother, sister or child. Whether it's a privilege, a right, or a responsibility, it's still a human being. Eighteen thousand people do suffer and die each year because they lack preventive services, a timely diagnosis or appropriate care. About 10 million children lack insurance.
The problem with health care in America, it's not the quality. It is the inflation. Healthcare is too costly and insurers are very undeserving.
