Thursday, July 20, 2017

Insurance Companies Have Ruined Healthcare

During the Obama administration the politicians found ways of bringing our government to a halt. Now that Trump is there with a GOP owned congress our politicians are finding ever more clever ways to grind our nation's business to a standstill.

The GOP says that the ACA is on a death spiral. The Dems say that the GOP are trying to coldly throw millions of folks off the health insurance rolls. Both of them lament the rising cost of premiums, deductibles and co-pays. Let's not forget the ever rising cost of prescription drugs. The Democrats and Republicans what to cover everyone, but both of the political parties are stuck with insurance company involvement. Nether of them are able to divorce themselves from the idea that people must have health insurance.

That's why the ACA is failing, insurance companies. The number one concern should be the health of the people. That concern has been and still is subordinate to insurance company profitability. There was a time in our nation when insurance companies and banks were thought of as crooks. Now they have their fingers in everything. Some of those things are of a nature that makes it counterproductive to involve private industry or a profit motive. Human suffering and healthcare are not conducive to a profit motive. The profit motive in health care causes human suffering, and that's counterproductive.

If we were a fly on the wall of an insurance company boardroom, what might we find? We might find a group of highly paid individuals making strategies on their profitability. Each of those board members are going to offer strategies that will enrich them in the end with higher paychecks or higher bonuses. Their primary concern is the bottom line. Their own bottom line, not your health or even your life. That's why throwing 25 million people off health insurance is not a problem. If that's what it takes to increase profitability, boardroom paychecks and bonuses, that's what they will lobby government to do,

The insurance companies lobby government in an effort to get legislation passed that will cause them to get an ever larger share of the GDP. As long as insurance companies rule healthcare in our nation, there are no incentives to cut costs. If 100% of GDP could be scooped up, that's what would happen with our system of healthcare. So we have people raising the price of a pill to $1000 each. We also get insurance company CEO's who bring in $66 million a year lavish bonuses, and denied coverage for the ones who most need it.

What we really need is for our elected officials to acknowledge the fact that mixing insurance and healthcare is a bad idea. As long as we have the political parties fighting for the insurance companies, it will be, and always is, the general population who will suffer with denied coverage, and pay the CEO bonuses with money that should have went to the care of some of our people.

Just like the police force and military, human healthcare is not amenable to private enterprise and a profit motive. As long as our elected officials continue to attempt to make a compromise with insurance companies and full coverage for all of our people, full coverage will not be realized. Full coverage will always be sacrificed in the name of insurance company profits.

This is why I believe we need a Medicare for all single payer system of healthcare. Insurance companies can go insure something else, like cars and buildings.

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