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I agree whole-heartedly. I'm not sure what insurance actually adds to the system given that the government is already subsidizing the kinds of people that really need insurance and the fact that insurance companies are incredibly reluctant to actually shell out the cash that they agreed to.
Health insurance companies are a tax collector (and insurance premiums a de facto payroll tax) that doesn't get voted out of office for raising middle/upper-middle class taxes, unlike politicians. Also, they (and the provider-level admins fighting them) are a massive white collar welfare program, with millions of marginally to highly educated workers drawing salaries to perform the office work equivalent of digging holes and filling them back up again for no reason.
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Cost control. It's keeping cost from going to infinity even faster than it is, given the limited supply and destruction of price signals by law and custom. The insurance company's reluctance to shell out cash is an essential service.
Untrue, especially in context of the 80:20 rule which means higher premiums directly equal higher profits because margins are effectively capped. Even beyond that, insurance cost control is highly limited to a few high profile cases. And again, much of the most expensive healthcare for chronic or long-standing conditions is funded directly by the state for the old and poor.
There’s no evidence that single payer nationalized systems are more generous. In fact, US private insurers are by far the most generous healthcare insurers when it comes to overspending on drugs and surgery in the entire world. Meanwhile, the most socialized systems like the NHS are often criticized for not paying for million-dollar treatments so that kids with incurable diseases can live in pain for an extra month and play hardball with big pharma even for very valuable drugs.
Yeah, I've seen it said that American lefties dream about Euro-style health care system because they think that such a system will dole out treatments at will and for asking, basically, when that is generally not the case at all.
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One quirk of the UK system is that drugs prescribed by an NHS doctor cost like $12 per prescription to pick up at a pharmacy. This fee is mostly the same regardless of medication.
But the old, the poor, and children are exempted from this fee. Because these people consume almost all drugs, this means that 95% of all prescriptions are free. So all the fee amounts to is an extra tax for 18-60 year old functioning, gainfully employed adults when they need medication. The US system reminds me of this.
One contributor to the UK's economic dysfunction is probably that we have a slim majority of the population with living standards that have been entirely insulated from the wider state of the economy, by pensions, welfare, or otherwise. Causes all kinds of political malincentives to place almost all the burden on a dwindling share of gainfully employed childbearing-age adults, while giving them nothing in return. The prescription exemptions are just a tiny fraction of the whole system.
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