Comment on Why do we have to do the health insurance company's job for them?
Boozilla@lemmy.world 8 months agoSeveral decades ago in the USA, healthcare was affordable to working class people. It wasn’t cheap, but it was at least affordable to middle class people. It certainly wasn’t great even back then, because in my view healthcare is a basic human right. And poor people (especially minorities) had limited or no access. But even then, it was still better than the shit show we have today.
Anyway, what happened was some large corporations like IBM and others started offering an executive perk they called “major medical”. This was to help pay for expensive, unexpected medical expenses. It was a nice perk for the country club set. But like anything with money attached to it, some people got together and said, “Gentlemen, how can we weaponize this and take ALL the money?”
So, over time, it became the “standard practice” to tie your health insurance to your employer. This introduced a ton of friction into the system and created an entire ecosystem of rent-seekers who add no value to the patients or providers but charge a fee just because they exist.
rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Hmmh. I recently learned about that. Seems to be roughly 1980 when things started going sideways and nowadays it’s really bad…
Life_expectancy_vs_healthcare_spending
Boozilla@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That graph is depressing and familiar. It’s insane how we think we’re “the greatest country” in the face of cold embarrassing facts.
rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
That was the graph that opened my eyes a bit back in another discussion. I knew that people were dying in the States because they can’t afford insulin/medication/treatment. But I somehow thought they were at least paying less for healthcare and just poor and society didn’t care about people in need. But it’s way worse. They are paying twice as much for healthcare AND dying 2 years earlier. AND ruined financially if anything happens.
And all of that is a scheme to rip off everyone. Sadly a quite successful scheme for decades already. I mean I’m really amazed by the extent. And I wonder if it were possible to adopt the European style, give healthcare to everyone plus every citizen an additional $5.000 for free each year.
Boozilla@lemmy.world 8 months ago
A significant portion of our population is brainwashed into the idea that everything should be privatized for-profit. Even people who are profoundly harmed by this. They have been indoctrinated to despise and be revolted by socialized-anything.
iamanoldguy@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’ve seen that graph before. One of the ways I interpret it is that as one ages we contribute less (money) to the system, mainly in taxes, SS, Medicare taxes. When we become old and retire we become a burden on the system that we’ve contributed for decades. The “system “ whoever that may be no longer cares about our health and longevity because they already have their money and the lower our life expectancy the less they have to pay out. Collect for decades only to pay out for a few years and we die up to a decade earlier than other countries on average.
rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
I don’t think that’s what the graph shows at all. It shows what the average person spends on healthcare each year versus what they get out of it (life expectancy.)
It does so for several countries and how things changed over the last half a century. The steeper a line of a country is, the more the healthcare system has improved. The flatter a line is, the more money you’re pumping into the system for less benefit. And medicine should improve. We’ve made quite some progress since the 1970s and found cures to ilnesses that were a death sentence back then.
That people need more treatment if they’re old is a true fact. But it’s not really depicted in this graph. Sure it’s somewhere in the numbers but you’d need a different diagram for that. Keep in mind that also in the 1970s people grew older and there were old people around… People had grandmas back then.
The fact that the line for the USA is such an outliar shows that there is something severely wrong with healthcare system. And you can see when it started and it continues this way. Either you’re a different species and medicine works differently for US citizens than for Europeans, or you have severely unique circumstances in the country, or you’re just getting ripped off and some people get rich with the billions that don’t contribute towards health.
And there are some more pecularities in the graph. For example you can see that life expectancy is actually decreasing(!) in the last years. That could depict the drugs (Fentanyl deaths) and the rise of suicide in the last years. I’m not sure but these could be possible explanations. Also im Germany where I live mortality rises. Especially during the Covid years and it affects people from Eastern Germany more than people from the western part of the country. That’s all not in this graph however and the reasons are complex.