• @finitebanjo
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    1 day ago

    It’s actually explicitly not mandatory.

    If your only options for insurance are unlikely to cover the expected costs of your care because of their terms, then it’s only a loss. If your coverage might cover tens of thousands of dollars of surgery that you couldn’t cover otherwise, then it’s prudent to take the insurance fee loss than the surgery loss.

    In a system where insurance doesn’t exist but the government also doesn’t fund it, each individual person would be financially crippled with debt if anything ever went wrong. We’ve also seen healthcare savings plans and mutual funds equally or even moreso capable of such fraud and unethical terms.

    Ideally, we would elect representatives who want all healthcare funded through the government. The government is very clearly capable of operating at a deficit, and in fact would spend less under that system than they do currently on healthcare through subsidies and programs which compete with insurance companies despite not having authority over medical pricing.

    I actually think a better analogy is treating it as a tax than a racket, currently. It’s still not accurate, but if you avoid paying it long enough then you get the mother of all fines. If you avoid paying a racket, you’ll also get the mother of all fines, because they’re gonna break your fucking legs.

    • @hexadenceOP
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      -222 hours ago

      In a system where insurance doesn’t exist but the government also doesn’t fund it, each individual person would be financially crippled with debt if anything ever went wrong.

      1. No. If the insurance didn’t create the atmosphere of territorial turfing, prices would be naturally set by competition. They would be much more accessible.

      2. Let us not forget the amount of claims that get denied in order to guarantee financial solvency for the middleman parasites.

      .

      Ideally, we would elect representatives who want all healthcare funded through the government.

      Yeah. Let’s just support this nonsense by printing more money. /s

      If you avoid paying a racket, you’ll also get the mother of all fines, because they’re gonna break your fucking legs.

      Direct violence is out of fashion. Now it is all about systematic financial crippling into homelessness and starvation.

      • @finitebanjo
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        22 hours ago

        No. If the insurance didn’t create the atmosphere of territorial turfing, prices would be naturally set by competition. They would be much more accessible.

        Hospitals aren’t very competitive. Theres maybe 1 in a large town and that’s it. Small practices are already competitive. You do have a point about insurance companies intentionally driving costs up, but the hospital networks themselves have even more say and the only way to take that power away is having regulators set the prices and not the providers.

        Let us not forget the amount of claims that get denied in order to guarantee financial solvency for the middleman parasites.

        Average 18% denied, less than a percentage of denied claims appealed. So 82% of claims get covered.

        Yeah. Let’s just support this nonsense by printing more money. /s

        Actually, as I mentioned, the government would spend less than they currently do.

        Direct violence is out of fashion. Now it is all about systematic financial crippling into homelessness and starvation.

        Because nobody ever wins with direct violence. Everyone loses.

      • @[email protected]
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        20 hours ago

        If the insurance didn’t create the atmosphere of territorial turfing, prices would be naturally set by competition. They would be much more accessible.

        Healthcare suffers from several very competition distorting Economic effects.

        • The so called “expert advantage”, which is the situation were the buyer doesn’t have the expertise to judge the quality of the service the seller is offering.
        • That buyers are willing to pay just about anything to survive, so unlike pretty much everything else the upper limit to prices is incredibly high (basically, everything a person has plus how much debt they can take in).
        • As somebody else pointed out, healthcare service provision is geographically constrained for a lot of things, the more urgent the situation the worse it gets, so for example if you have an accident and your life is in danger, if there is only one Hospital in town that’s were the ambulance will take you, so you literally have no choice.
        • The cost and time to train medical professionals as well as of the equipment, means that for anything beyond simple clinics there is a high barrier to entry into that market.

        Unlike the ideological pseudo-magical fantasy bullshit that some politicians spew about the Free Market in order to defend certain choices of theirs that benefit those who given them millionaire speech circuit fees and non-executive board memberships (namelly to justify privatising things that are in low competition or even natural monopoly markets), Free Market Theory only works for a few markets where there is a natural tendency for competition such as, say, teddy bears or soap, not for markets were there are multiple factors reducing choice and the ability of buyers to judge the quality of what they are buying before they buy it.