this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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It's actually explicitly not mandatory.
If your only options for insurance are unlikely to cover the expected costs of your care because of their terms, then it's only a loss. If your coverage might cover tens of thousands of dollars of surgery that you couldn't cover otherwise, then it's prudent to take the insurance fee loss than the surgery loss.
In a system where insurance doesn't exist but the government also doesn't fund it, each individual person would be financially crippled with debt if anything ever went wrong. We've also seen healthcare savings plans and mutual funds equally or even moreso capable of such fraud and unethical terms.
Ideally, we would elect representatives who want all healthcare funded through the government. The government is very clearly capable of operating at a deficit, and in fact would spend less under that system than they do currently on healthcare through subsidies and programs which compete with insurance companies despite not having authority over medical pricing.
I actually think a better analogy is treating it as a tax than a racket, currently. It's still not accurate, but if you avoid paying it long enough then you get the mother of all fines. If you avoid paying a racket, you'll also get the mother of all fines, because they're gonna break your fucking legs.
No. If the insurance didn't create the atmosphere of territorial turfing, prices would be naturally set by competition. They would be much more accessible.
Let us not forget the amount of claims that get denied in order to guarantee financial solvency for the middleman parasites.
.
Yeah. Let's just support this nonsense by printing more money. /s
Direct violence is out of fashion. Now it is all about systematic financial crippling into homelessness and starvation.
Hospitals aren't very competitive. Theres maybe 1 in a large town and that's it. Small practices are already competitive. You do have a point about insurance companies intentionally driving costs up, but the hospital networks themselves have even more say and the only way to take that power away is having regulators set the prices and not the providers.
Average 18% denied, less than a percentage of denied claims appealed. So 82% of claims get covered.
Actually, as I mentioned, the government would spend less than they currently do.
Because nobody ever wins with direct violence. Everyone loses.
Healthcare suffers from several very competition distorting Economic effects.
Unlike the ideological pseudo-magical fantasy bullshit that some politicians spew about the Free Market in order to defend certain choices of theirs that benefit those who given them millionaire speech circuit fees and non-executive board memberships (namelly to justify privatising things that are in low competition or even natural monopoly markets), Free Market Theory only works for a few markets where there is a natural tendency for competition such as, say, teddy bears or soap, not for markets were there are multiple factors reducing choice and the ability of buyers to judge the quality of what they are buying before they buy it.