It's Time To Fix The Health Care System

 Part of a post by Dan Rather:

The American health insurance “system” is a misnomer. It implies that it was intentionally designed. In truth, coverage in the United States entails a messy patchwork of private insurance companies covering 65% of those insured and government-funded insurance (Medicare and Medicaid) covering the other 35%.

Senator Bernie Sanders is a proponent of health care for all provided by the federal government. What we have “is a system not designed to provide health care to all people in a cost-effective way,” Sanders said of the current setup. “It is a system designed to make huge profits for the insurance companies, the drug companies, and many other industries within the system.”

Most of those private insurance companies are publicly traded entities whose primary goal is to make money. And boy, do they.

Last year, UnitedHealthcare, the largest private insurance company in the country, made $16 billion in profit. To boost profits even further a company must reduce costs. The easiest way for insurance companies to do so is to deny coverage. UnitedHealthcare, which has one of the highest denial rates in the industry, turns down about a third of all claims.

Shockingly to me, many health insurance companies — UnitedHealthcare among them — outsource the decision-making of approving or denying coverage to third parties that use AI-generated algorithms to make life-and-death judgements. According to reporting by ProPublica, this hidden cottage industry works by a “denials for dollars” model. The more they deny, the more they get paid.

It is no wonder people are infuriated and some are praising a self-styled vigilante who claimed he was trying to do something about it.

A 2023 Gallup poll found that just 31% of Americans trust the U.S. health csare system. One in 4 report delaying or foregoing medical treatment because of cost. While the Affordable Care Act has improved things, adding 45 million people to the insurance rolls, an estimated 23% of these are still underinsured, meaning they don’t have enough coverage.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had politicians who had the guts to do something about this mess? Health care lobbyists have spent more than $150 million to keep Congress in line.

And now we have Donald Trump and his bevy of billionaires, including the world’s richest man, looking to cut costs. Elon Musk says he may consider Social Security and Medicare as possible places to find savings.

The system can be fixed, but it would take elected officials willing to have the government do more, not less, at least when it comes to health care. Anybody think that sounds like Trump, et al.?