Comment by jjav
15 hours ago
> To throw in a data point on this for reference, as an American I pay around ~$220 a month (~$2,640 per year) on health insurance
Having just filled my annual benefits selections tonight, here's my data point: health insurance is $3000/month on the company plan (36K/year).
Yes, the company "pays" for a percentage of that. But of course the entire $3K/month is part of my total compensation cost to the company. If healthcare wasn't so ludicrously expensive in the US, they could afford to pay me more, instead of funneling all this money to insurance company profits.
Insurance companies don’t actually make very much profit. I don’t recall the exact number, but something like 80-90% of premiums taken in are paid out in claims. Insurance companies are an easy target though, since no one wants to go after the doctors and hospitals for charging too much.
> Insurance companies don’t actually make very much profit.
Insurance companies usually (maybe it's always, not certain) are regulated to a percentage cap spent on categories. What is the result? They are incentivized to push prices ever higher as much and as fast as possible because a % of higher price is more profit for them.
> Insurance companies are an easy target though, since no one wants to go after the doctors and hospitals for charging too much.
Doctors and hospitals actually provide a valuable service, they provide health care. They deserve to be paid.
Insurance companies provide no value whatsoever, they are just a middleman siphoning off profits off the work of doctors (and nurses and everyone else doing the actual work).
Also, doctors don't actually charge that much. When I get billed $980 for a 15 minute doctor visit (as I just was last month), it is most certainly not because the doctor is earning ~$4000/hr. That doctor isn't paid more than your average senior software engineer (in Silicon Valley anyway), all the rest of the money is lost to middlemen who didn't contribute anything.