Summary
The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has reignited debates over the U.S. healthcare system, with Americans sharing stories of denial, delays, and exorbitant costs despite having insurance.
Many report fighting insurers for coverage of essential treatments, facing hidden costs, and taking drastic steps like career changes to secure health insurance.
Critics blame corporate greed for worsening access and affordability, while others note the system’s complexity discourages seeking care.
Though some find employer-provided plans satisfactory, the overall system is described as profit-driven and increasingly inaccessible, leaving many financially strained or avoiding medical help altogether.
No, it was always like this.
You just got older and found out how bad it is.
It really wasn’t. I am 51 years old and I noticed a big shift when HMOs became a thing. Also, ask any doctor in or near retirement age and they will also tell you that it is very different now. Hell, twenty years ago it’s when I started hearing about doctors closing private practices because of medical malpractice insurance costs exploding.
I think this is the end result of a deregulation perfect storm across multiple aspects of American healthcare.
20+ years ago I was told I’d have a $20 co pay by the Dr, and was billed almost $300. Because I didn’t get pre approved to see an ear Dr. Insurance has been shit my entire life.
Sure, it goes back to the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973. Technically it wasn’t always like this.
But this has always been a nightmare shithole country where healthcare is for profit. It should be fucking free.
One of the things that FDR did that wasn’t great was allowing health care to be organized into HMO’s. Nixon then switched those HMOs from not for profit, to for profit in 1973 with the HMO act.
Prior to FDR, you paid the doctor with what you could. Not necessarily cash, but many towns provided a free house for their doctors and they were frequently paid in fresh produce.
1973? Shit. Seems to line up with the time period of 1969-1977 when a whole bunch of shit got fucked for the common man.
The worsening of this and a lot of other things which are now reaching unbearable abuse levels all align neatly with Neoliberalism, starting with Reagan.
Take the State from the job of Regulation and you naturally end up with lots of feedback cycles were all the natural uneveness in real markets (effects totally unaknowledged in Free Market Theory and which make most Markets there very opposite of competitive) snowballs into monopolies, cartels, networking effects and other means of market locking, feeding into becoming ever more so, and when entrenched enough being abused to the max, from enshittification to health insurers knowingly fraudulently refusing to pay the bills for life saving treatment because they know those people are too poor to sue them or will die before any lawsuit ends up in a judgment.
When it’s all self-“regulation” and there’s no “big government” smacking down on abuses, the objectives of the actors still left in the market with the most power are the ones which the system de facto is optimized to achieve, and without “big government” the most powerful actors in the market by far are Big Money, who will optimizing things so that they become even bigger money.
Start of transition from FDR style governing which culminated with raygoon. What we are seeing today is a parasite utopia.
Practices closing start at least by late 2000s, most of the 2010s there was a lot of consolidation, esp targeting provider firms with ownership shifting to PE firms. While health insurance newly hopped up on ACA regulations turn into mega corpos in their own right along with vertical integration.
Long story short, this is how the frog got cooked folks.
Kasier Permanente is a non profit so prolly has the best bones. All these parasites need to be nationalized under Kasier and then over a decade turned into a single payer, government ran organization model on of the successful templates across the world. Daddy pick which one he likes but this shot has to work.
This will never happen, i have better chance of exiting work class 🤡
53 here. Healthcare in America has never been worse in my lifetime.
Well yes and no. Healthcare has always been restricted in the US, especially through racism and sexism, but the dystopian insurance shit didn’t really come into force until the mid 90s.
I had a “crazy aunt” who could never get off her soapbox about how HMOs were going to ruin healthcare in the US. Looking back, she was a true “walk the walk” sort of hippy and I wish everyone in the family had taken her more seriously about various things. We’re out of touch these days, but I often remember how right she was.
If you drop her a note telling her that, it’ll almost certainly be very appreciated.
The truth tellers often get stoned, must be something about human condition. Normies larp talking points they hear on teevee so the truth teller sounds either retarded or a lunatic.
Then years later some of us realize they were actually on point and it hits like a brick wall.
One of “Obamacare’s” selling points was to outlaw effectively-fake health insurance plans that were written upfront not to cover any actual care. Those policies had been around a lot longer than the mid-90s, but most employers were smart enough to avoid them, so they were really only a problem for poorer people buying individual insurance, and who cares about them?
My guess is that the old fake-insurance providers are the ones who figured out how to get around the ACA coverage requirements in ways that aren’t technically violations. Or figured out that no one was going to enforce penalties for those violations. Those practices have now crept into ‘mainstream’ providers, but it sure looks like no one cared until a CEO died.
This is the core business model for any sufficiently large legal for profit entity. They know they get benefit of the doubt from the state regulators and law enforcement so they will push that line until it become common practice and then push it again. Enshitification is how looks on consumer side.
I worked for maybe a decade in Investment Banking back in the 2000s and early 2010s and one thing I realized after a couple of years in the Industry was that fines for lawbreaking were really just another business risk and calculated into the Profit & Loss estimations.
Looking around I would say that, at least amongst large companies, that practice is now the general rule in just about all industries - if the only penalties are monetary and paid by the company, individuals controlling budgets within companies will treat fines for regulatory non-compliance or even crime just like they treat any other business risk.
Make people personally liable for crime committed for the company (including using criminal association laws against companies) and fines a percentage of a company’s revenue (like the EU does for certain modern pan-European legislation) and most of these things would stop - there would be no need of Luigi doing what he did if Brian Thompson and those like him would’ve gotten jail time for Manslaughter if even just a single case of people being fraudulently denied life-saving treatment and dying could be shown to have been the result of his policies in the company.
Deff neee criminal liability to be attached to some of these “business” decisions but even the fines were actually enforced it would be a step in the right direction.
Currently most of stuff just doesn’t even get enforced by any government body. From corporate perspective government are limp dock idiots. Why bother follow the law.
I dont think it was always bene this bad but surely during all of my working life and getting worse.
A lot of consolidation and stripping of functions from hospitals to third parties has made it so much worse. It really wasn’t this bad a couple decades ago.
Big part of this is PE firms being able to structure this entities where they cut out lucrative portions of the service chain, and then loot it like that. IE tests is one example, make it out of network too whole at it;)
Nixon basically legalised for-profit healthcare in 73.