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Originally Posted by dotti105
I put much of the blame for our current confusion and chaos in healthcare squarely on the back of the Insurance Industry.
I am a RN and have watched, like many others out there, as Insurance companies made the decisions regarding which provider a patient could see, and making frequent changes in the list of allowable providers. ( As well as restricting medications and increasing co pays out of sight for non formulary drugs for example)
We were very concerned about the standard of health care we would receive once on Medicare. Fortunately we have been very impressed and pleased with the standard of care we receive at TV on UHC Villages Advantage plan.
We have also been able to see the specialists we have selected thus far as they have all accepted our Medicare Advantage Plan.
WE are the ones who create the My father was a MD and I remember the day he walked in after work and said that the Insurance Companies had a choke hold on Doctors, Hospitals and patients. He passed away before it got really ugly.
I personally am still praying for a single payer system for all, a Medicare for all. If all the young healthy people in our country were put into the same system the cost for all would go down. highest costs in the healthcare system. But as long as the Insurance Companies can control our health care it will be a series of changes, cuts, buyouts and profits are the name of the game.
The fact that a few Insurance companies can band together, through buy outs and mergers, and excluding other companies patients, will make having predictable convenient and dependable healthcare very difficult. It hurts us all, the providers and the patients.
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I too favor a single payer system, but with the caveat that the government is barred from administering its own program, otherwise, cost will go UP
Administrative costs for private insurance run 11-13%, government program insurance runs about 32%---which just goes to prove what we all already know---1 private sector worker can do as much as 3 government workers.
There will be those that go online and see numbers like medicare has a 5% administrative cost, but this is a fallacy. Medicare gets gov't office space, paid for in a different budget. They don't have billing and collection costs--that's in the IRS budget. They don't have mailing cost, office equipment cost, phone cost---I think the GSO covers that. They operate across state lines, which private insurance cannot do. When you add it all up from the different budgets, it comes to about 32%
And according to a BNA study, “Popular comparisons of Medicare and private group health plan ‘overhead’ costs wrongly compare only a part of administrative expenses related to the Medicare program to the whole of private sector administrative expenses for comparable large group health plans.” The report also says that Medicare’s costs for claims administration “are really about the same as claims administration costs in the private large group health plan market.” Moreover, some of Medicare’s general administration costs are expensed elsewhere in the federal budget, and others, like premium taxes, do not apply to the Medicare program. - See more at: Fact Check on Administrative Costs | AHIP Coverage
Finally, the other downside: Your dad may have been correct about the insurance company "choke hold", but that would be traded in for a GOVERNMENT choke hold. I leave it to the reader to decide which is worse