Comment by Arainach
1 year ago
Insurance companies funded the vast majority of advertising using that term to attack the ACA, and their lobbyists meet with politicians often enough that it's entirely plausible they coined the initial term as well (though harder to prove)
So there is no evidence.
The simpler explanation is that political Party A proposed legislation, and political Party B attacks it because a win for Party A is a loss for Party B.
And digging into just slightly further makes the claim make even less sense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_panel
> Palin's spokesperson pointed to Section 1233 of bill HR 3200 which would have paid physicians for providing voluntary counseling to Medicare patients about living wills, advance directives, and end-of-life care options. Palin's claim was reported as false and criticized by the press, fact-checkers, academics, physicians, Democrats, and some Republicans.
Why would managed care organizations (aka health insurance companies) oppose the government paying for more healthcare services?
MCOs earn 2% to 3% of the premiums that flow through them. The higher the healthcare spend, the higher the premiums, the higher the profit for MCOs.
"No evidence" - if you can't avoid misinterpreting every sentence to go off on a rant, this thread is not worth continuing.
Insurance companies spent billions of dollars on advertisements against the ACA. This is public record. They did it because they opposed all of the good things the act required - such as prohibiting discrimination base on pre-existing conditions or demographics (other than age), requiring many basic procedures to be covered, bans on lifetime/annual coverage maximums, bans on dropping policy holders when they get sick, prohibiting copays on various services such as vaccines, requiring that insurers spend at least 80% of their premiums on health costs, a wide array of reforms to constrain costs, and so on.
Someone claimed health insurance companies came up with “death panels”, I provided evidence and logic to the contrary.
No one is ranting, but there does seem to be a lot of “I feel like this could have happened, so I am going to choose to believe this happened because it confirms my priors”.
2 replies →