Private health insurance is the biggest fucking scam ever. The private insurance companies benefit by getting the aggregate healthiest population into their plans (working adults). The most likely to be expensive people, i.e. old people (on medicare) or poor people (on medicaid, or not even on an insurance plan) are on government, tax payer insurance plans. There is literally no reason except for corporate profiteering that Medicare should not be expanded to cover all people.
Also all those conversations, especially in the 2020 election period, were totally bullshit. You say something like M4A will cost 44 trillion dollars or whatever, which sounds like an insane amount of money. What is often left out of the discussion is that estimated cost was 1) over 10 years and 2) has to be weighed against the current costs we already pay for insurance. So the deal was very simple: the overall costs would go down because the overall spending would be less, and at the same time millions of people without coverage would be covered, and at the same time you don’t have to contemplate stupid bullshit like in network, out of network providers. Or ever again talk to your insurance about why something is or isn’t covered. Boils my blood when I think too much about this.
Not even gonna weigh in on things like how medicare can’t negotiate prescription drug prices (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/us/politics/medicare-drug-price-negotiations-lawsuits.html), or how dental, vision, and hearing are treated separately from general healthcare, or how med school is prohibitively expensive, or how the residents after med school are overworked because the guy who institutionalize that practice was literally a cokehead. Those are all just bonus topics. The point is we are getting fleeced.
Probably gonna anger both sides here, but I see both private insurance and single-payer healthcare as equally-evil scams. Why not focus on driving down costs of healthcare (i.e. EVERYTHING) so that you throw a couple bucks at the receptionist to cover your surgery then check to see if you have enough for a post-surgery soda?
My personal top 3:
- insurance
- subscriptions
- Google and similar data hungry companies (while not a financial scam but moreso a privacy scam, companies like Google and Meta profiteering on our personal data without our knowledge or awareness)
Technically insurance only works if everybody pays in. Wouldn’t work as a concept if every tom dick and harry could pay them $100 then a week later need $100,000. They’d basically be out of business right quick with nothing to provide for anyone. Maybe as some believe it should just be provided through taxes, but it’s certainly not a scam.
The scam part comes when you are forced to fight tooth and nail to get money from them even when you are clearly covered
It’s true insurance companies need to take in adequate premiums in order to have the money the money to pay claims. And when done in balance, insurance is a great thing. Not all insurance in a scam, no doubting that.
But the current state of insurance, especially health insurance in the US, shows that these companies are making massive profits. How does this happen? Literally one way: They take in more premiums than they pay out in coverage. How? By either knowingly overcharging people or skirting out of paying covered claims through other means (such as baseless rejections).
That’s the problem with the entire insurance industry and why it must be properly regulated in any industry: It is a race to the bottom. The worse the insurer treats the people that buy insurance from them, the better the company does financially (charge a lot, pay out a little). Mix in the fact that (1) you cannot shop around at the time you need a claim and (2) the contracts are so intensive only a sophisticated legal team can interpret them, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
So you’re right that all insurance isn’t necessarily a scam. But if you can’t see that the US health insurance industry raking in profits shows serious dysfunction that could be considered a scam, it’s worth taking a second look.
Nobody works for free. In order to be a large effective and not out of business business you need to have a profit to cover overhead like staff.
Did someone say people should work for free? No where am I saying that. Massive profits are not necessary to cover overhead - expenses like overheard and salaries are paid for by revenue - what’s leftover is profit.
This thread is about whether the current US healthcare insurance industry is a scam or not. Scam means “a dishonest scheme” and insurance saying it’s going to provide healthcare coverage but actually just takes your money, doesn’t provide coverage, and only pays investors/executives could be considered a dishonest scheme by many.
Insurance companies have a natural tendency to become worse and worse over time. This is called the race to the bottom and is an incredibly well-known phenomena in insurance. Like monopolies, insurance is one of the rare situations where experts are in damn-near universal agreement that heavy regulation is necessary.
Right now, insurance companies are objectively very bad to the people they provide coverage for. This isn’t an opinion, this is a fact that’s easily verified and well understood. They are not being effectively regulated and as such, are racing to the bottom by providing absolutely terrible coverage while taking in massive premiums. This is not good for anyone and is not fixed by a free market in any way. You cannot effectively shop for insurance and their behavior is not rectified, unless prohibited by law (regulation).
I only posted what I did because your post read like you expected insurance to run by paying out 100% of what they get in. The thread started with general insurance but many zeroed in on health insurance. Yes there are problems, obviously, but certain things like denying claims comes about from many people trying to scam payments and the insurers tightening security too much without enough oversight.
Everybody seems to think there’s huge payments going to investors and C level executives but that comes from market confidence. So the stock price rises and those bonuses of stock options appreciate without the company paying a dime.
United Healthcare pulled in $20 BILLION dollars in PROFIT in 2022. The ceo was given $24 million in compensation for that year. Denying claims because of scams? They can afford it.
How was that compensation structured? Was it cash or stock? And how much money would they spend if they didn’t act paranoid about false claims? Would that dissolve the 80 billion because it’s possible.
Aside from that, did you notice this is a 2 month old post?
Antivirus software
Service as a subscription, for me. It used to be you bought a product and then you owned it. Now if you want practically anything from streaming media to freaking car washes, you have to “subscribe”.
The stock market and publicly traded companies. The idea that a business that is making consistent profits isn’t good unless those profits are increased each quarter is asinine. This system of shortsighted hyper focus on short term quarterly growth for the sake of growth is the cause of so much pain and suffering in the world. Even companies with amazing financials will work to push workers compensation down, cut corners and exploit loopholes to make sure their profits are always growing. Consistent large profits aren’t good enough.
I think a major problem with the stock market is the lack of long term planing. And we see that clearly with what’s happened to Boeing with their planes falling apart
If you invest in the stock market and expect companies to be making large profits all the time then you’re going to be very disappointed. That’s not how it works. There are financial reports, market regulators, analysts. History tells us that awful companies with shady practices would always get caught in the end, no matter how big they are.
Everyone should invest, but investors should always do their research.
This is not about small-time regular Joe investors, but about large institutional ones, who do exert pressure on companies to deliver strong profits and/or growth.
Instapot. Instapot made too good of a product, most people buy one and its good for years. That’s good for consumers but terrible for investors. The company that bought them out and took them public saddled them with a ton of debt from other sectors and now they’re bankrupt.
Religion. Whole cloth.
Tipping in restaurants…pay the workers.
Yep, tipping is fundamentally unethical.
Religion
Real estate agents getting 6% commission from the seller.
Sell it yourself then.
No one can because of laws written by real estate agents who turned into legislators.
Go get your real estate license. It’s not hard especially if you’re going to be complaining about the 6%
In my state it requires a six week class, passing a test, then working under a licensed broker for 6 months. I considered it.
That’s not true. I’ve sold real estate to a buyer without a realtor.
Your ISP is suddenly asking for more money. What are you gonna do? Disconnect from the internet?
People who vote for conservatives
Car centric cities. Cities can and should be designed for people, keeping cars mostly out. The result is beautiful cities designed for people that make governments lots of money but the car companies will be earning a little less, ooffff
Make cities walkable, create actual safe roads for bikes, create 15 minute cities.
Look at the Netherlands, it damn works awesome
Depends on if you have cities that people actually want to live in.
In American cities, you generally want to get out of them as quickly as possible so you don’t get mugged or shot.
Ironically, that’s why the suburbs started existing in the first place, people fleeing crime.
ads
Then start somewhere. Require new construction to be built for humans first. Then bit by bit change.
The Netherlands did this back in 1960 and look at it now. They too had to start somewhere and they did
It requires investment in your infrastructure which well, in the US that’s a joke.
Capitalism and religion, easily the top two scams.
