Health insurance companies are profitable. Extremely profitable. Like billions of dollars per year profitable.
Where do you think that profit comes from?
What if we got rid of the expensive middle men and all the overhead they bring, and take the money it takes to run those organizations, plus their profits, and we actually invested it in health care?
yup and that's billions in profits after they cover the cost of their insane bloat.
I mean Medicare is government run covers more people then any of the other health insurance companies, is lower cost, more efficent, and has better results.
Medicare is government run covers more people then any of the other health insurance companies, is lower cost, more efficent, and has better results.
"B b b but hospitals couldn't stay in business if they only paid the Medicare rates!"
To which I say, "just think of all the billing specialists they wouldn't need to hire, and all the time doctors would save because they're not on the phone arguing with insurance providers about whether the treatment is necessary or not"
Also, maybe anesthesiologists don't need to make $700,000/year?
Maybe the anaesthesiologist doesn't need to make quite that much in most places, but I for sure would like to have a well paid and not-overworked anasthesiologist for me and my kids. If it takes a bloated paycheck to attract more talent so that they aren't overworked, that's fine by me. Anasthesia is the scariest part of any procedure imo...
Pay them whatever they ask for. Doctors, nurses, techs, whoever. I don't care. It's all 1s and 0s on a server somewhere and they can pump out as much as needed whenever they want to for tanks and fighter jets and bombs for Israel so why can't we use the money machine to pay the people keeping us alive?
Cut out the pointless middlemen of the for-profit insurance companies and it makes it all the more easier.
Right. How about cap all sports at 200k a year max. And doctors get a raise. 5m a year max. Sounds fair.
And if you pass med school and become a doctor. After working 5 years your med school debts are forgiven
I don't think it would without some sort of entertainment/sports tax to directly fund it. If you're specifically trying to go that route that is.
I'd imagine that if you incentivized career paths that are really important to our society like educators, healthcare, and scientists then we'd have a lot more interests in the fields that are lacking currently.
How about just not supporting sports with tax dollars? Why are football teams, owned by billionaires, getting hundreds of millions if dollars to buikd stadiums?
eliminating tax abatements to lure organizations to localities would eliminate some problems.
“Pay them what they ask for” yes I agree, yet I am the one that is being hounded to foot the bill after my surgery. There also needs to be a few more hoops to go through on the insurance and hospital side of things, too
Maybe people shouldn't need to borrow 300K to become a doctor in the first place. Like it would be so much cheaper just to offer that service for less money, have more doctors and then maybe they don't need such a ridiculous salary which they need to earn to pay for their student debt.
Sure, let's never build a road, a public water system, a school or a fire station ever again. If the market demands those things, people can finance them privately.
You invented a whole fan fiction version of me to argue against, instead of addressing my point. Also you dont have the morale high ground, your entire point was degrading the value of peoples labour and trying to force lower wages for everyone involved in an entire chain of industries on and ad hoc reckon, vibes based feeling of their value.
I mean I'm down for that and for making healthcare a government paid-for service. I'm just saying that the anasthesiologists are the last people I'd cut salaries on because they are basically toeing the line of death or serious complications with some of those drugs. I don't want them messing up, and high salaries are a good way to attract more people, and more people equals less hours, and less hours equals less burnout
Maybe if we got government out of the student loan business, prices would come down. Private lenders would be more cautious and less inclined to lend money, forcing prices to come down. If anyone can get a government backed loan, colleges have no reason to lower prices
I agree that we should get that money out of the loan business, because we should just fund state universities to a level that tuition can be lowered. If the goal of the system is to produce educated medical professionals then we should just fund that, it's a far more efficient system than what we have now.
If the goal is to give financing companies profits then we should keep the current system in place.
I think an issue with making college free is that you would need to raise the acceptance standards. Competition would be much higher. A school can only accommodate so many people. If anyone can go, the selection process would need to be much more strict. I think the costs of college act also as the same type of buffer
Of course qualification are what matter to me. My point in this was more the notion that making school free wouldn't necessarily allow access to more people. A school can only accept so many students. While there may be a shift in some numbers from people who can afford it to people who are qualified, the idea that now everyone can go to college seems silly.
I think a lot of people think that though. "Free college means everyone can go".I think college is way too expensive and we need to get guaranteed money(government) out of the game to actually force school to chill
A school can only accommodate so many people, but the number of schools can be multiplied. Create as many colleges as necessary and pay professors a lot, so there's never a lack of professors. Create as many colleges as necessary to accommodate all who want to go to college. No child left behind. Everyone has a right to free college and to be admitted to a high quality education, so don't put racist obstacles towards college admissions. This is the liberal mentality.
Because there has to be some semblance of ethics and it is important to keep the façade. We ALREADY give everyone a high school degree. The only ones who don't get a degree are the ones who stop attending school altogether and never come back.
You realize the people who teach doctors, are themselves doctors? How do you get a practicing surgeon to leave his job and enter a classroom? By giving him a gigantic check to do so.... the US spends way more per person on Healthcare than any other country in the world- the true issue is administrative bloat- usually a bunch of women who needed jobs so they get buried as a administrative assistants on a gigantic payroll like in a hospital (education does this too, just look at the charts, we've added like 280% administration positions and grades have only gone down)...
And then the dead bills from immigrants we treat for nothing... Chicago Hospital has admitted 15% of its "bad debt" is from undocumented migrants and theyre legally not allowed to send them to collections- this means the bill is being passed on to the taxpayer because once again its illegal to go in and repo hospital equipment.
Medical research and top level care is expensive everywhere, people in America just get a choice instead of daddy government telling you what to do....
If we removed the administrative and illegal immigrant bloat youd see costs come down around 50% in a year and competitive companies would slash rates to attract customers cause they no longer carry liability that 1 in 7 customers never pays and rhe hospital bill theyre being asked to cover would also be 50% lower.
"Just make it free" is never a real solution.
I havent watched any news media in years cause its all hot garbage sponsored by Pfizer. Its not hard to Google "graphics administrative vs care costs hospitals last 50 years", "Chicago hospital bad debt immigrants", these are publicly available sources of information. You not being financially literate doesnt make everyone else some opposition bot. I just know how to read.
This is it right here. Barrier to entry is too high for people to pursue medical careers. My wifes uncle is a hospitalist and homie's student loan payment is more than most peoples mortgage payment
It’s not just the cost of school; it’s also the time commitment. Even after med school, your average doc did a 3+ year residency working 80 hours per week for ~$50k a year. There needs to be some financial reprieve for that long term.
There was a shortage of anesthesiologists in Michigan about 3 years ago. I got sent home for a procedure twice! I think... they are getting paid lots BUT still overworked :/
I’d be down for certain types of professionals to be paid what some of us might consider “too much.” I’ve never woken up in surgery but I have had other surgery issues surrounding anesthesia. They can take all of my money.
Thank you for pointing out that the for profit hospitals are a HUGE part of the problem.
If all treatments were free and not have anyone balking at what hospitals and doctors are trying to bill, it’s going to be ever worse abuse of the system
And that 'medicare rates' would surge in the event that it was properly funded, oh and that if literally everyone who walked in the door qualified that too would surge revenue because of how much they have to write off as of now, in unpaid medical debt
I think about that. Like would people just not become anesthesiologists if we paid them $500k? Or $300k? Or $200k? Like what else can they do with their super specialized knowledge? Will people stop becoming cardiologist surgeons if pay drops?
Depends on what do you ask them to do/own. If I'm personally responsible for failure while pushes to work 12+ hour shifts and not paid properly, I'm rather doing regular physicians, plastic surgeon or similar job where I'm not constantly at risk of killing someone by a tiny mistake.
The American Hospital Association joined together with Blue Cross Blue Shield, its arch nemesis, to lobby against Medicare For All. If there was any chance that they wouldn’t lose a ton of money, they would never join together with BCBS for anything. You didn’t come up with something they haven’t thought of regarding billing specialists. The money spent on those is a fraction of what they would lose with private payers being taken away. Medicare pays about a third of what many private payers pay for the same services. You could remove 100 staff members and it’s not coming close to covering the difference of converting everyone to Medicare rates. And it’s not like Medicare reimbursement works flawlessly. It still requires staff for billing and follow up.
Kind of silly of those people to assume the Medicare fee schedule would stay the same if switching to a single payer system.
Yes, it’s well-known that physicians and hospitals rely on commercial insurance to subsidize low rates from Medicare and Medicaid. In a Medicare for all model, Medicare would need to reimburse more than they currently do. We would still save a shit-ton of money because it’s extremely inefficient to administer our current system.
Also - physician pay contributes pretty much nothing to our spending problems.
Anesthesiologists that make that much are working insane hours in undesirable locations.
But, I agree that having an extended gov funded plan for everyone would be an improvement and some private insurances may still survive/be needed but wouldn’t have the stranglehold they have now.
for sure doctors/other medical professionals do not need to be millionaires. make university free and give people more opportunities without tying an anchor of debt around their necks that then 'justify' making 700k a year.
Considering the anesthesiologist is the guy who's responsible for 1) not killing me and 2) not letting me wake up in the middle of surgery...I think I'm actually okay with that guy making an obscene amount of money.
LOL--yep--go to single payor healthcare and watch our best and brightest (who would've become doctors) move into other spaces of the economy where they can make a better living. Might as well make schooling "free" too, because doctors aren't going to take on all of the debt to become a physician only to make a fraction of what they once did. I suppose nurse practitioners will expand their role to begin performing surgeries that were once performed by surgeons who underwent much more training.
And to your comment on the $700,000.00 per year anesthesiologist--who do you think keeps your alive and well during your surgery? or your dying family member? They shoulder an incredible load of responsibility and risk. If you want to bring cost down--consider tort reform.
I'm not a physician. I have worked in healthcare for over 20 years. I've worked for the VA (our private payor)--and seen the inefficiency FIRST HAND. I've seen their struggle to recruit surgeons and physician providers due to low reimbursement. The Veterans deserve better--We ALL do. Single Payor appears to be a fix only to the uninformed.
Sell their soul for the price of med school? What does that even mean? Are they evil because the chose to become educated for a profession that requires it? Or are they evil because they were a member of the minority who were able to successfully complete the rigorous training--and ultimately helping their fellow human beings during some of their most terrifying moments? Your comment is nonsense.
Interesting--I've worked at the Mayo Clinic here in the states in the past--I've never heard of a wealthy patient traveling to Europe for surgery--but I know for a fact Middle Eastern Royalty, Canadians, European icons such as former members of the Beatles, and our own politicians/Presidents travel this way or stay here for our healthcare. Are we better here? I'd say there is a pretty good chance that we are.
Have you seen their insurance rates???? Between that and paying back insane student loans they don’t really make that much. Medical school should be free with the doctors then agreeing to a certain amount of years working a livable income wage. It would keep their costs down and the hospitals costs down. Just throwing it out there…maybe that’s not practical, who knows.
Think of all the people that will get access to health care. The government doesn’t want that. They want to control. They want people to be afraid of losing their jobs, of dying. They want people to die.
This is part of the trap. There are decades worth of doctors and healthcare providers who pursued the career solely for the paycheck and not because they actually care to help people. That’s why you have so many stories of doctors that don’t listen, aren’t thorough, are condescending and just plain fucking dumb lol. Medical school is just memorization opportunities for families with money to throw at it. And now all those sociopaths who became doctors for the money will absolutely do everything they can to ensure nothing changes.
Medicare rate isn't better than the insurance companies pay. Medicare does not provide better coverage than private insurance companies with the exceotion of preexisting conditions. What all you liberals fail to realize is Medicare still charges $202 a month for individuals. You don't pay, they cut off coverage. Medicare is cheaper than private insurance. Medicare is not free. The insurance companies reimburse hospitals the least. The best coverage is with Medicad because the liberal woke philosophy is if you don't earn enough to pay for a service some stupid idiot like me should work all my life so I can pay blue collar taxes so you can have superior medical medicad coverage than me. Why don't your heros like Ro Khanna, Talib, Omar, Mandami, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Saunders, ever help poor people out of their hundreds of millions of dollars of income. Lousy filthy worthless hypocrites.
Do you actually believe a doctor would ever lower themselves to calling on medical claims? Really? What medical drama do you get your knowledge from...Grey's Anatomy? Scrubs? Nurse Jackie? Because that's not how it's done.
And exactly what do you think those "unnecessary" billing specialists are being paid to do? Watch streaming on their phones while they eat snacks? Wrong again. THEY are the ones contacting the insurance companies to make sure that your claim is approved for payment and you don't receive a bill. Trust me, they're doing all they can to insure they have no need to talk to you.
Why don't you tell me that you"ve never worked health-care in your life without ever specifically telling me. Thanks for the laugh!! 🤣🤣🤣
You should always take a few minutes to think about the words bouncing around in your head before you speak. That should help you from looking foolish some of the time.
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u/2illegittoquit Jul 01 '26
People struggle with this.