“Feds help health insurers hide their dirty secret: denials on the rise By Betsy McCaughey Published Dec. 12, 2024, 6:28 p.m. ET This still image from surveillance video obtained by the Associated Press shows the suspect, left, sought in the the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.AP The health insurance industry’s dirty secret is that it’s no longer selling insurance: It’s selling a crapshoot. The risk of having your health insurance claim denied is roughly 10 times what it was a decade ago. Back then, insurers seldom rejected claims Aetna 1.5% in 2013, per the American Medical Association. By 2022, major insurers were refusing to pay, on average, 15% of claims, according to a national survey of hospitals and health-care providers by Premier, an insurance consultant. The figure continues to shoot upward, with some companies today denying almost halfof all claims, according to researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation. But you can’t find out which companies, and that makes choosing a plan a high-stakes gamble. If you’re seriously ill and need costly care, a denied claim could push you into bankruptcy. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 requires the Department of Health and Human Services to monitor claims denials and provide the information to the public. But government officials — coopted by the industry — simply don’t do it. Consumers be damned. Uncle Sam is allowing claims denial to become a major profit center for insurers. The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is igniting an outpouring of vitriol against insurers….” https://nypost.com/2024/12/12/opinion/feds-help-health-insurers-hide-dirty-secret-rising-denials/
This explains the meteoric rise in HMO & health insurance company stocks since the ACA. Insurance is the only industry I know that wants to sell a product the buyer doesn't need so they can skim off the top. It's a subsidy program from the healthy to the sick. I have paid auto insurance for 33 years even though I have had 1 ticket & 1 accident both about 30 years ago. The state wants good drivers to subsidize the wreckless drivers. In short the Insurance industry has been a scam from day one. Only catastrophic insurance makes sense. That was the original purpose of insurance. I remember growing up in NYC in the 1970s and no one had medical insurance. Every transaction with a doctor was stated outright & paid via cash or check.
I wonder if the left will start assassinating university presidents as a way of getting even with and highlighting the student loan and inflated college costs with no return on investment scams. You know once you have started dressing up funny like little Hamas warriors and running around the cities threatening Jews there are all sorts of other targets out there and a growing appetite for it. There was a time that the progressives argued that Obamacare was cure-all for all the health insurance scams. The "exchanges" were going to be the great efficient marketplaces. Now they tell us it all sucks and you need to assassinate more people for revenge. Sigh.
You know your argument is exaggerated and heavily biased nonsense. Let's keep going...."Because of the medical insurance fraud lets start running around the cities threatening doctors and nurses". See how stupid you are?
Ummm... wreckless driver = a drive who has never been in a wreck Do you mean a careless, negligent, or irresponsible driver? That would be a reckless driver.
That's no longer a feasible model. Health care costs have risen exponentially, in a way that cannot be fully explained by any current theory or analysis. Many believe that the insurance industry itself is largely responsible. And this may be true to a certain degree, but there is more to it than that. The dramatic advances in health care technology, and the cost of research and bringing new treatments to the market, also plays a role. Today, if you get an infection that lands you in the hospital, even for just a couple nights, say, like some sort of severe food poisoning or something, if you don't have insurance, that could easily cost you 20% of your annual salary, or even more. And those numbers are seriously twisted. They're not real. Hospitals charge uninsured patients more because they don't have the contractual bargaining power that an insurance company does. But the fiction doesn't stop there. Most people who don't have insurance never actually pay those bills. If they do, they pay a fraction of them after it is sent to a collection agency. But many qualify for financial assistance, from the hospital, becuase if their income is below a certain threshhold, the hospital must offer such assistance. This is just the tip of the iceberg of how broken the whole system is. People who have insurance are subsidizing care for people who don't. Obamacare was an effort to fix that problem, but the program was gutted by all kinds of modifications to the law that were made by the Republican-controlled Congress years later. The penalties for not having insurance were repealed. So the number of subscribers has steadily dropped. Insurance companies are dropping out of the marketplace, because the pool isn't big enough anymore. Those policies are not profitable. Only the sickest people are buying the insurance. You need healthy people in order for the system to work. That's how insurance is supposed to work. That's the whole concept, that you spread the risk across a large pool. In an ealier post in this thread, I pointed out that health insurance is very different from other types of insurance, because with other types of insurance, the policy holder generally does not expect to file claims. They reasonably believe that they will not need to use the insurance. That is how insurance was originally designed to work. Health insurance doesn't work that way anymore. Here's my previous post: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...-and-killed-in-ny.382229/page-13#post-6064817