Comment by WarmWash
10 hours ago
Firey take, but health insurers are not the problem they are made out to be. They're on your team and benefit from lower prices just as much as you do. They don't make any money either, don't argue with me, buy their stocks if you are so convinced and see how that goes over.
Health care providers carry immense blame. It's full of passionless people in it for the outsized paychecks, who once inside will just seek whatever local minimum to stay employed.
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Nurses in the US are actually very highly paid. Ask anyone how their week was. They'll all say it was crap.
Exactly, ask anyone in a job for the money how their week was.
Not saying nursing is stress free, or every nurse is bad, but like tech companies in 2021, it's full of directionless people who pushed through the cert program to get paid $50/hr with $100/hr weekend shifts and be disgruntled with you that you are making them do work.
The disillusionment comes from hospital admins constantly squeezing blood from a stone.
Patient populations are up, nursing FTEs down. Support staff down.
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What an arrogant comment.
Nursing is one of the most physically and mentally demanding jobs I know of, at least in Germany.
And I bet 80% of the Techbros here wouldn't last a month in it, given how many lost their minds over a simple RTO-Mandate.
Maybe watch the movie "Late Shift" to get an idea of how a Workday is https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C7o-omvW_DI
I doubt that "directionless" people would put up with those working conditions, and many leave the sector after a few years, simply because they burn out. Nearly no one works 100% long-term, just because it's too much too.
Insurers are only allowed to keep a % as profits. Higher spending increases the absolute amount of profit that can be retained.
Having worked in medicine, I agree about providers. People who probably got in it to help people burn out immediately and become like the rest of us looking for the best paycheck with a tolerable workplace.
Insurance companies make plenty of money though. Cigna makes $7-8B per year and pays a decent dividend.
They add an entire layer of make work and waste just for existing.
> health insurers...'re on your team and benefit from lower prices just as much as you do
You're missing a very, very, very important piece here.
Which is that the lowest price of all is to deny treatment entirely.
They are not on your team, they are the opposite team. Their revenue is basically fixed, at the level of your premiums. But the more health care they pay for you to receive, the less profit they make. That's just arithmetic.
This is why there are so many horror stories of people being denied necessary treatment, or having to fight for months and years to get their treatment actually paid for. Insurance providers are incentivized to do their absolute best at taking your money and then not paying for care, through every sort of technicality and "mistake" and arbitrary judgment and limit they can come up with.
No, that's not how it works. Due to the ACA minimum medical loss ratio, most health plans have no direct financial incentive to deny treatment.
It's nice to know they do it just for the love of the game.
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The several+ times in my life I've had to sort out billing issues, the health "insurance" agents have been helpful and friendly, stating what bills should be in no uncertain terms, even offering to conference call with billing departments to get things resolved, etc... Meanwhile provider billing departments routinely try to defraud me, even going so far as to bully me to pay those fraudulent amounts, don't follow up on things (eg filing claims) that are their responsibility and that they've said they will take care of, and generally make their problems into my problems.
This certainly isn't a defense of health "insurance" companies though! I just think they're better modeled as Lovecraftian horrors animated by paperwork and compelling the creation of ever more paperwork to feed on, rather than money-grubbing cheapskates as the pop-political narrative goes. And the approaches for fixing one are much different than the approaches for fixing the other.
If health insurers are on my team why do they blatantly lie about their network coverage to me? Why do they list providers as in-network, when the providers consider themselves out of network?
Why aren't the executives of these insurers shilling ghost networks not in prison for mail fraud?
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