General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Drug goes from $50/vial to $28,000/vial. Best Healthcare in the world, Baby! [View all]Demo_Chris
(6,234 posts)It's a business. Their job is to make money for their investors and for themselves. If someone invests into a company the expect and demand a ruthless quest for profit and the maximum return on the investment. Business is business, that's ALL these companies are doing and that is all that they will ever do.
And that's the problem.
So long as healthcare is a business this is the only thing we will ever see. It will never get better. It will instead accelerate as the more aggressive businesses dominate and displace the less ruthless. And the same rules apply to all aspects of healthcare.
Insurance companies make their money by collecting more from policy holders than the actual healthcare costs. Those who manage to charge the most while paying out the least will inevitably come to dominate the industry. In 2011, for example, the company UnitedHealth posted NET earnings of five billion dollars on 100 billion in revenue. From this, it might appear as if Unitedhealth paid out an amazing amount of money to healthcare providers, right? Remember, the took in 100 billion from policy holders, but the amount paid to healthcare providers was about 50 billion. The rest was overhead, including paying their CEO about 55 million in total compensation -- including stock options and what not. In other words, the extra fifty-billion they collected from policy holders was extra money that patients spent for no reason whatsoever except to keep UnitedHealth in the business of fucking them over.
And those numbers will only get worse. Thanks to Obamacare, these insurance companies now have a everyone -- by law -- in their pool of customers.
The same applies to for-profit hospitals and doctors. Their profit is based upon charging more than treatment costs. And so it goes. Everyone, the insurance companies and drug companies and hospitals, ALL of them are charging more than things cost and pocketting the profits. The better at this they are, the more they can charge and the less they pay out, the more likely they are to crush their competetors (and earn themselves unreal paychecks in the process).
This is, of course, why American's pay so much more than everyone else in the world while receiving so much less.
Sadly, these business owners and investors have friends in government, and for only tiny contributions these Washington friends can be purchased.