Get health insurance companies out of our lives.

[Nye Bevan]

1. I'm one of the biggest defenders of capitalism on this board.

Because most of the time, capitalism works well. A corporation markets a good product, people like it, they buy more of it, the customers are happy, the corporation makes money, everybody wins. Obviously regulations are needed to prevent abuses but overall it's a good system.

However, this model sometimes breaks down and fails, and one example of this is in the case of health insurers. Their whole business model for profitability is to deny as much care as possible. Their incentives are not to make their customers happy. If, at the end of a year of being insured, every single policyholder of a particular health insurer is absolutely delighted with them, that insurer has probably had a terrible year financially. Because they don't make money keeping people happy, they make money nitpicking, questioning claims, forgetting to send reimbursements, and so on. People like me know how to play the game and persist with sending appeals, getting third-party reviews, complaining to the state and so on, but plenty of people just give up, resulting in higher profits for the insurer.

Capitalism usually works well, but this is one of the examples where it doesn't.