In America, general consent is that insurance companies are entitled to profit from your illness [View all]

[MrScorpio]

They're betting that you're going to get sick. And since just about everyone gets sick or hurt at anytime in their life... That's a sure bet that's guaranteed to pay off big time.

Most other industrialized countries understand this as well, and put a premium in minimizing the financial risk accrued from individual illness by making access to healthcare a right, not a paid privilege. The burden is shared collectively, because of the universal nature of illness and the capacity of the greater society to handle it. Also, cost is minimized, because it takes away the middleman who's sole purpose is to be a gateway for the expense of healthcare. Middlemen who are motivated, not by providing more efficient and effective care, but by profit alone.

That profit motive incentivizes the insurance company to withhold, delay and diminish care at the very crucial time of need. Such delays can only serve to exacerbate life threatening health issues and can endanger the life of the person seeking care. These delays frequently override the wishes of patients to get care and the ability of medicine to provide it.

Thereby the person paying insurance premiums is liable to find him or herself bearing all the cost and all the risk from their need of care for the sake of propping up an entity that puts the importance of its own coffers above the needs of the individual that they're supposed to be serving.

Insurance companies cherry pick what kind of care that they will pay for. Always eyeing their bottom line, determining the risk to their own profits over the need of care for the patient and the requirements of actual medicine to provide it.

They're looking out for themselves, when they're supposed to be looking out for YOU.

So, I ask:

- How is this freedom?

- Isn't this actually nothing more than vulnerability to the whims of private insurance companies?

- Since all health insurance companies are capable of being simular barriers to care, isn't the freedom of choice of picking any insurance company merely an illusion?

- What is the benefit of depending on a profit driven entity to determine whether care will be provided, or when, above the requirements of the health care providers?

Frankly, we need to change our belief that companies are entitled to profit from illness, without any the beneficial provision of actual care. All they're doing is funneling money.

We pay more per capita for healthcare than any country using a single payer system, whereas all of their citizens are covered and a sizable portion of the people living in the United States is not.

Americans are at risk of losing their ability to access affordable healthcare if they lose their jobs, whereas the people who live in single payer countries have access to care whether they're employed or not.

In America, there's a greater financial burden placed on family units, increasing incrementally in relationship to size and for those who are self-employed, whereas in single payer countries the bursen of cost is shared more evenly.

Lastly, the obscenity of profitting from the illness of others is sacrosanct in America, whereas the needs of the general welfare comes first through the use of a single payer system elsewhere.


It's clear that those use the language of condemnation of single payer, cost cutting and universally provided health care as being a danger to "freedom" and "liberty" are, in fact, defending the freedom of insurance companies to rob premium payers blind when they're in need of care.

Our priorities need to change. In this debate over whether the ACA wil be upheld or struck down by a politically polarized Supreme Court, the bottom line comes down to whether and/or when we evolve our healthcare system that values access to care OVER access of insurance companies to their profit from selectively restricted care.

Will we change for the benefit of everyone, or for just the benefit of the greedy few?

One last thing, this private profit vs. shared public access question really comes down to a matter of morality... What's more important, fealty to greed, or the greater good? Why is the commodification of illness called "freedom"?

Can anyone answer that?

Again, I'm just agonizing over things that I don't understand about this country. You really don't have to pay any attention to me.

So, I leave you to return to your regularly scheduled General Discussion.