Private insurance not so great for us
Tom Maertens
Mankato Free Press
What’s so great about private health insurance? The insurance companies’ principal goal is not to provide health care. It is just the opposite: to provide as little health care as possible in order to maximize profits.
They start by rationing health care to the healthiest, weeding out anyone who might actually be sick or become sick. They do their best to reduce “insurance losses” by refusing claims, contesting expenses, imposing lifetime limits on care, limiting the payout per illness and by invoking the fine print to cancel costly clients. They also create enormous administrative costs for those who battle the insurance bureaucrats.
If there were no government regulation, you can predict that some of those companies would become nothing more than premium-collecting businesses, their hands out when you didn’t need help but quick to cancel coverage if you became seriously ill.
It’s the government that does all the health care heavy lifting — Medicare for old people, Medicaid for poor people, and the VA for veterans. According to the estimates of some medical experts, those three agencies remove as much as 85 percent of the risk from the health insurance pool, leaving the healthiest segment to private companies.
Polls show that these three programs are enormously popular, partly because the government won’t cancel your coverage when you get sick or lose your job.
Even with the deck stacked in their favor, insurance companies pay as much as 47 percent of the premium dollars they receive — according to a University of Minnesota study — in “loading fees,” such as marketing, profit, paperwork and CEO salaries that average $14 million per year; and paying millions to spread disinformation about health care reform.
What’s so great about private health insurance?
Mankato Free Press
What’s so great about private health insurance? The insurance companies’ principal goal is not to provide health care. It is just the opposite: to provide as little health care as possible in order to maximize profits.
They start by rationing health care to the healthiest, weeding out anyone who might actually be sick or become sick. They do their best to reduce “insurance losses” by refusing claims, contesting expenses, imposing lifetime limits on care, limiting the payout per illness and by invoking the fine print to cancel costly clients. They also create enormous administrative costs for those who battle the insurance bureaucrats.
If there were no government regulation, you can predict that some of those companies would become nothing more than premium-collecting businesses, their hands out when you didn’t need help but quick to cancel coverage if you became seriously ill.
It’s the government that does all the health care heavy lifting — Medicare for old people, Medicaid for poor people, and the VA for veterans. According to the estimates of some medical experts, those three agencies remove as much as 85 percent of the risk from the health insurance pool, leaving the healthiest segment to private companies.
Polls show that these three programs are enormously popular, partly because the government won’t cancel your coverage when you get sick or lose your job.
Even with the deck stacked in their favor, insurance companies pay as much as 47 percent of the premium dollars they receive — according to a University of Minnesota study — in “loading fees,” such as marketing, profit, paperwork and CEO salaries that average $14 million per year; and paying millions to spread disinformation about health care reform.
What’s so great about private health insurance?
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