re: Data for you to ponder tonight: insurers are not the villain. Providers are

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How do you justify this?

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How do you justify my family member, a doctor at a world renowned medical facility, making roughly $20-25/hr for 6 to 7 years?

I pointed this same thing out in the first UNH assassination thread and the socialists jumped on me. HHM is spot on with this OP.

It's a 6% profit margin for that company, it's a publicly held company, so their financials are public and auditable. What about all these "charitable" and "private" non-public providers, where's their financials? I guarantee you it's more than 6% margin.

Now that my aunt and uncle are deceased I could probably tell you more, they ran a private practice primary care ripping off insurance and the government for millions over decades, bragged about it. How to code this, how to code that. Customer/patient thinking they are dropping $20 copay for $500 worth of services then blame the insurance company when their premiums and deductibles are so high. It's because at the window, it only costs them $20 for their care. But they are paying so much more to the ins co's so it must be the ins co's that are the bad guy. They don't realize that 95% of the money they pay to their ins co's goes straight to the providers they think so highly of.

$371 Billion is a lot of money to take in while providing zero value to their customers, and still making their rate payers pay again to the actual providers when they actually need it. Parasites tend to have a symbiotic relationship with their hosts, while slowly bleeding them dry.

I am in the field and often talk about this when people complain about profits. The one thing I will say is that the fact that they own Optum and Optum’s biggest customer is UHC means money flows across the books in some interesting ways.

I don’t necessarily agree with United’s approach to some things but providers, big pharma, and the big food industry all have to come together for change.

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and the one with the largest market share. Its net profit margin is just 6.11%:

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How much profit would they make if their ceo made 2 million instead of 51 million?

I literally know of ZERO doctors who charge exorbitant bills and expect to receive any of it

Doctors are not the issue at all

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How do you justify this?

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Improved wait times, surgeons with significantly better training, UK salary data not necessarily reflective of the number of folks who work in both systems (most of them) would be a start.

And yet, no mention of drug prices.

Walmarts cheap because they buy a ton of stuff.

The USA should have the cheapest drugs in the world. Here we pay 1500$ a month for a drug that people pay 200$ a month for in China.

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The actual people charging you an arm and a leg for your care, and putting you at risk of medical bankruptcy, are the providers themselves

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Wrong. You think the pediatrician or internist making less than 250k are doing this? Try all of the hospitals and the bullshite number of people they have to hire and the amount of hurdles they have to maneuver to satisfy Joint Commission and CMS regulations.

There are a few issues with these salary comparisons. First, with many physicians they bill based on numbers of encounters, not in a prescribed hours/day workday. Overseas are more like a daily wage, see a minimum quota of patients, but not in the bulk of American doctors. This is a reason for the long wait times for many overseas patients.

The next is the national healthcare shortage. Most docs are working a 1.5-2.5 FTE equivalent. So what’s often reported isn’t a “typical” salary but reflective of that calm and overage burden. There are numerous other factors and healthcare providers aren’t blameless, but it’s much more nuanced than these simplified graphs.