Mehmet Oz, widely recognized as television’s “Dr. Oz” and President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid, has sparked controversy over resurfaced remarks from a 2013 speech, where he addressed the balance between personal and governmental responsibility for the uninsured.Dr. Oz...
  • @FlowVoidEnglish
    -1•5 days ago

    Most hospitals are nonprofits.

    So are several large health insurance companies, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente.

    Guess what: nonprofits deny care too. So do single-payer health care systems.

    • @AliasAKAEnglish
      2•5 days ago

      I’m not suggesting it’s perfect — I’m suggesting it’s better. I’m suggesting optimizing a healthcare system around profit instead of population level health measures shouldn’t be done. I’m not suggesting that making things be non profit or single payer will magically resolve all issues, only that it will be better.

      • @FlowVoidEnglish
        1•5 days ago

        OK, but you can already find health care that is not optimized around profit. Just sign up for BCBS (which is available in most places) and choose a nonprofit medical center as your PCP (which are easy to find since they greatly outnumber for-profit medical centers).

        I suspect you may find that this leads to slightly higher premiums. After all, one of the reasons UHC denies so many claims is to keep their premiums low. But in health care, you generally get what you pay for.

        • @AliasAKAEnglish
          2•5 days ago

          Not all BCBS plans are nonprofit actually. And most comparisons I can find for nonprofit medical facilities show lower costs. I haven’t found many studies on pure on profit health insurance vs for profit insurance, but I did find a Harvard paper which compared specifically BCBS plans that converted from non profit to for profit, and here’s an excerpt from that:

          Looping back to the theoretical models of NFP and FP health care organizations, the findings are consistent with models in which NFPs prioritize enrollment over profits (equivalently, models in which FPs prioritize profits over enrollment). While theoretically this difference in emphasis might not manifest in higher premiums or lower quality because FPs could be more efficient and find it optimal to maintain substantially the same premiums and quality as NFPs (and still reap higher profits via lower operating costs and/or medical expenses), empirically we do find there is a tradeoff: consumers face higher premiums when large NFPs convert to FP status. Although we do not directly study quality, we find no indirect evidence of quality improvements, as inferred from a model of employee healthplan choice. Moreover, we do find evidence that rivals of converting plans experienced sizeable increases in medical spending following conversion, a result that suggests FPs are likelier than NPs to engage in risk selection practices (e.g., denying or deterring enrollment of individuals with poor health or high health risk, a practice that was legal during the study period).

          Here NP is nonprofit, FP is for profit, and NFP is not for profit. Bold emphasis is mine. You can read the study here:

          https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication Files/20130370_manuscript_c83842eb-f97b-4c84-b356-c72d163dff9b.pdf

          So I would find actually the opposite of what you said, in aggregate, according to this study. Secondly, I still argue for expanded Medicaid and a public option / single payer. I’ve worked with large population datasets from US and internationally — invariably the health outcomes and monitoring, quality of data and followup, are all better for single payer systems.

          • @FlowVoidEnglish
            1•5 days ago

            Interesting paper!

            Thank you for the link.