re: Health Insurance is out of control!!!

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Universal healthcare is not the utopian idea you have been misled to believe it is. As bad as our system is, it could be worse.

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How can it be worse if you have no coverage or if the average cost per person is $13k?

What good is this great technology if we cannot afford it?

Besides, this is another myth by the big pharma and the health industry. We can continue to fund research, and by cutting these greedy people out, we will have even more money to invest.

Asian and European scientists are doing great things in medical research.

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How can it be worse if you have no coverage or if the average cost per person is $13k?

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Easy.

Healthcare has three aspects: quantity of people it's provided for, quality of the care, and cost (price).

You can improve on any one of those points on the triangle but all other things being equal it's going to have cost on at least one other point.

So for example, you can expand on the number of people you provide care for, but that's going to negatively affect quality or cost, or both.

As posted above (multiple times now) quality is a function of a few factors and one of them is continuing R&D. Another one is the caliber of provider that is incentivized to go into the field. Another one is the ability to pay for support staff and buy and replace/upgrade equipment at regular intervals.

So you tell me what system you advocate for and I will tell you what the downside will be.

For example, we could eliminate insurance policies other than purely catastrophic policies. You get hit by a car and have to be helicoptered somewhere. You get cancer and require $300,000 worth of treatment. That sort of thing.

Routine care (which would be everything from checkups to routine labs to minor or elective surgeries, including most orthopedic surgeries) would be completely out of pocket.

Now if we did that, you'd eliminate insurance policy premiums (the catastrophic policies could be taxpayer funded if you want, as they would be cheap), maximize competition, and as a result health care prices/costs would absolutely plummet.

So you'd have a vast improvement in cost.

But not as many people would be able to afford things like surgery for meniscus tears or even things like heart stents, even though the costs of those things would come way down. So you'd suffer a negative outcome on quantity.

You would also suffer a negative outcome when it comes to quality. I've owned a couple of variations of medical clinics in my professional life. Both the insurance and cash variety. And I can tell you that cash operations have to stay lean and slightly understaffed in order to make it work. Expensive equipment, nice facilities, and paying the going rate for the very best providers and staff is simply not an option in that model.

So you have to pick your poison. What's most important to you? Quality, quantity, or price?

Obama Care, by design, increased the cost of healthcare. There’s no going back by scolding CEOs.

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How can it be worse if you have no coverage or if the average cost per person is $13k?

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How can this be? The affordable care act passed? This is what we were told would happen if it DIDNT pass.

You mean to tell me this is what happened when it DID?

It’s almost like one party was absolutely correct when this was being rammed through. Which one was that?

Redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the welfare class by use of the healthcare system....Obamacare at its finest.

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somali or Indian...

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Europe

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“We pay premium drug prices because we protect the intellectual property of pharmaceutical companies”

You forgot the part about how much pharma spends on campaign contributions to politicians( Cassidy alone got 1 million last 2 years) and lobbyists(pharma spent 10 billion dollars on lobbyists 2024.Thats billions with a B).
They also spend a lot promoting their drugs to Drs.They cut out a lot of the free trips,tickets to sporting events,etc.Now it’s bringing lunch to Drs.offices,
paying Drs.to give talks about drugs at “educational” events often accompanied by a nice dinner.
A big racket now is to award grants to certain Drs.to participate in”research projects”.
I don’t know how much Pharma spends on advertising but it’s a lot.

They spend significantly more on all that than they do on R&D.

To investigate this question, researchers at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) analyzed financial reports from 92 large U.S. health care companies. The results were published on Feb. 10 in a research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The research team focused on U.S. health care companies on the Standard & Poor’s 500 (S&P 500), which follows the 500 largest companies traded on stock exchanges, to see how much money was spent on shareholder payouts in the last two decades. The analysis included pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, insurance companies, medical-supply companies, and large health care facilities such as for-profit hospitals.

Over the past 20 years, health care companies spent 95% of their net income on shareholder payouts, totaling up to $2.6 trillion, according to the research findings. Shareholder payouts also tripled over this period—a trend largely shaped by a few powerful pharmaceutical companies, the research team noted.

These findings reveal that “funds are being distributed back out to shareholders rather than being put back into the health care system,” says Cary Gross, MD, senior author of the study and professor of medicine at YSM. These decisions directly impact the health and health care of regular Americans, he says.

Tracking taxpayer money that funds health care
Health care is one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy. In 2023, health care accounted for 17% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP)—the total monetary value of all goods and services provided during that year.

Of the $5 trillion spent by the United States on health care in 2023, roughly 70% was funded “in some shape or form” by taxpayer money
As insurance premiums and drug prices have risen in recent years, pharmaceutical companies often argue that drug prices are high because of the up-front cost of research and development, says lead author Victor Roy, MD, PhD, who completed the research while a fellow at YSM and is now an assistant professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Pennsylvania. However, while researching one health care company, Roy noticed that most of the profits from a new medication went to shareholder payouts rather than reimbursing the cost of development.
The team found that, similarly to tech and finance, most of the profits realized by health care companies were redistributed to shareholders. Overall, shareholder payouts increased 315% between 2001 and 2022—a trend driven in part by 19 health care companies on the S&P 500 that accounted for 80% of the total payouts over this period.

The decision to prioritize shareholder payouts over reinvesting in health care by this small group of powerful companies likely influences the cost of health care for many Americans, says Roy.

“When shareholders expect greater payouts year in and year out, that has an impact on affordability,” he says. “One of the ways that [health care companies] make money is to keep prices high—or raise them.”

Because so much money in the health care industry comes from taxpayers, the United States could regulate the industry differently than it does other sectors, says Gross. For example, lawmakers could require some profits to be returned into the health care sector to help pay wages for health workers or finance drug development—similar to the way that companies applying for government grants to produce superconductors have been incentivized to help finance childcare for manufacturing and construction workers.

“Some might say, these are for-profit companies, so their goal is to make a profit,” says Gross. But “health care is a right, not a privilege. You can choose when to buy a car. You can’t choose to have a heart attack. As costs of care keep rising, it’s crucial to ask where our health dollars are going.”