Beginning of the End for Major Health Insurers

[DirkGently]

77. Failure of the infinite growth model of Capitalism.

There may have been a time when health insurance providers have provided real value, connecting patients with providers and negotiating better terms for both.

But then there is greed, and the constant demand that corporations increase profits. So instead of contributing efficiency to the process, insurers began to steal on both ends. Screw the providers on compensation; screw the patients on care.

At the end of the day, all insurers are doing now is trying to charge more for cheaper and cheaper services. That's the MBA-think that Republicans and conservatives push as the best way to conduct any kind of business. It's growth by exploitation. Suppliers on one end customers on the other. It's the Wal-marting of healthcare.

It's an impossible model with life / death issues. People don't have a choice in whether to fix a broken arm or treat a child's cancer. They will pay anything, or they will go broke trying. And doctors and hospitals can't provide care focused on healing the sick if insurance bean counters are telling them what constitutes care and what is compensable.

So we can either make healthcare something we provide ourselves through government services, or we can regulate insurance to the point where it's as close to the same thing as possible. Limit their profits. Limit their ability to prescribe or deny care. Tell them exactly how they are permitted to be middlemen, or cut them out altogether.

Maybe at some point we'll have a new capitalist model, where constant expansion and ever-increasing profits are discarded as the imaginary goals they are. Until then, for-profit industry just has to keep out of health care and prisons and the military, and anything else where the well-being of people is at stake.