Microblog Memes

Death panels?

Believe it or not, that's also Frank.

The insurance system does not work in the medical field, it would never work because insurance is for managing risks that are unknown, like a house flooding or your car getting hit in an intersection.

In medical "insurance" it is often dealing with known issues, and the insurance system is just not set up to deal with preventative care, annual check ups, mammograms, blood tests, or pre-existing conditions. It would be like trying to use car insurance to pay for an oil change, which is just as ridiculous as it sounds in your head.

That's exactly why the term "insurance" should be used when discussing a single payer system, it's not really insurance, it should be a collective action group that works together with the medical community to find a middle ground where hospitals can still exist and pay wages to their staff, the people can get the medical care they need without getting thrown into poverty for daring to get sick, and the government benefits from having a healthier population as a whole.

Too bad theres way too much money in the short term in keeping this all private, and having a sicker population, so we have decades of insurance company propaganda to work against, and a huge population of people that don't understand that by doing single payer health care your taxes would go up, but you also wouldn't be paying out the nose for medical insurance & medical care (because they don't cover anything). Also think of a world where your health care isn't beholden to your employment, all the different choices you'd make in your life.

How is that even legal? How is someone who hasn’t examined the patient and isn’t their physician allowed to make treatment decisions? If they even have the necessary qualifications.

People love to shit on the VA, because they're the largest American healthcare provider in the country so there's a lot of bad stories

But my last MRI went like this:

Doctor: you need an MRI, let me check if it's open. (Less than a minute on laptop). Ok, go down to room ____ and they can get you in now.

There's a huge up front cost for that machine, so for profit hospitals went everyone to use it to make the money back, and insurance wants no one to use it so they don't have to pay.

Take insurance out of the picture, take the hospital trying to make money out of the picture. And it's really that easy. No one pushes for unnecessary tests, no one tries to prevent necessary tests. And there's a huge push towards preventive medicine, because it's cheaper to catch shit early.

We already pay more than what it would cost, it's just the healthcare industry donates to both parties, so as long as both standards are "at least they're not the other team" shits never going to get fixed.

If we hold higher standards than that, it won't take many election cycles to get change to actually happen

There's two sides to this coin. On the one end, you have insurance companies refusing to pay for anything because the modern industry is just six scams in a trench coat.

But on the other, you have doctor's offices where the physician literally leases an MRI machine to the tune of several million dollars and then has to run a certain number of patients through the scanner every year or lose money. That's because the MRI patent is held by GE and they can charge 10-100x markups on hardware that is fundamental to modern medicine.

Its the same with diabetes treatments. Insurance companies will try and refuse service or kick people off their policies if they are at risk. But then pharmacy companies will sell $3 of insulin for $75, then kickback a chunk of the balance to judicial/congressional bribes in order to guarantee the cash flow.

At some level, the only insurance companies that can survive in such a market are the ones that say "No!" to everything. The even-remotely-ethical firms just get fleeced by the for-profit industry until they get bought out or go bankrupt. That, or you're Medicare/Medicaid and you have an infinite wallet backstopped by the US Treasury. You don't care if you're paying multiples of whatever any other clinic anywhere else in the world would charge on an enormous population of poor and elderly patients, because you have an unlimited money cannon to mow it all down with.

IThey can't even be sure after the MRI. Which again, proves your point. It took one MRI battery and one alert and skilled MRI tech to catch my brain cyst, THEN another whole set, I straight up spend a whole 8hr shift in an MRI machine, Then a TEAM of neurologists studied my custom hand made brain for MONTHS. THEN they had a really good set of educated guesses. Then they did the surgery, and only after they opened up my brain case did the actually see what in the hell was going on. Even after all that, my neurologists was like ''This is what we think is happening'', I asked what it would take to really know factually, he said an autopsy. He didn't recommend it. The point is, Doctors save lives with these scans, and nothing is certain. That's not a barrier to treatment, but no scans Is a barrier to treatment.

Bold to assume he bothered to feed it to a computer when you can just reject without having to do that. Feeding something to a computer takes time, and time is money y'know.

It became legal when we decided medicine was too important to be handled by a free market, and we created a labyrinth of laws governing how medicine must be administered.

Question: how the fuck did any of this ever become legal?

I would guess lobbying.

You do need some checks and balances because what's to stop a hospital from profiting off the insurance companies by asking for a CT scan/whatever of every single patient just because they can.

I suppose we could have the government run the hospitals too. But noooooo, that's never going to work out because communism or something.

Maybe we should try effective altruism and accelerationism instead? Let's just hand over all our money to a few tech bros and then we can go beg them to pay for the scans. And if they don't pay for it, surely someone will come up with a cheaper technology to do the same. Yes, that'll definitely work.

I fucking wish. At least then I wouldn't have to be put on hold for 30 min just to have to eventually explain to a person who was hired 3 weeks ago how to do their job.

Private insurance always has you speak to an actual adjuster for authorization, mainly because they know any sort of automated system would be more accurate and faster than having you talk to their undertrained and understaffed employees.

Private insurance's goal is to erect as many barriers between the provider and the patients as possible, and then blame the provider for all the barriers. It works every time.

"I have the best insurance, they told me it would be covered". Nope, Medicare is the best insurance and you traded that away for a privatized Medicare supplemental that lies to you about your coverage.

You should see what @pancakes@sh.itjust.works wrote in this very thread. You basically just answered their question about what this industry must do to a person's ability to empathize and be a decent person to others. Or in this case, maybe lack thereof is a job requirement?