• iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    wow he really said this?

    “Participants in the system,” he said, derive benefit from high health care costs. While lower prices and improved services can be good for consumers and patients, Witty said, they can “threaten revenue streams for organizations that depend on charging more for care.”

    Yes this basic human right could be cheap or even free, but then how would shareholders make more money exploiting it?

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      He’s also just straight up lying. I’m a participant in the system with chronic health issues. I would have benefited more from never going to see a doctor and kept my family out of debt than what I ended up doing.

      • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        Healing patients would “threaten revenue streams for organizations that depend on charging more for care.”

        They prefer the endless treatment model.

        So by extension, creating sick people is akin to opening a new account. (Aside: A good task for other parts of the institutional investors portfollio) And nobody wants to close a customer account.

    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      His entire business model is based on reducing the efficiency of health care spending and he is directly incentivized to maximize profits by minimizing health care spending efficiency.

      • MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        US health insurers literally offer zero social benefit. They should not exist as the entire industry in harmful rent seeking.

        • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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          23 hours ago

          The concept of insurance makes sense - pooling risk so that everyone can share a little pain all the time, so that unlikely but catastrophic events don’t wipe individuals out. Making this arrangement for-profit is asinine.

          • ajoebyanyothername@lemmy.world
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            10 hours ago

            Insurance generally, yes. But health insurance, no, especially when it could be funded by taxes like in other countries and still have that same element of shared risk, but without the perverse incentive to let people die just to create a little more profit for the precious shareholders.

            Which I appreciate is what you said, but I thought it bore repeating. Other forms of insurance I suspect would be harder to nationalise, but in theory there’s no reason they couldn’t.

            • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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              2 hours ago

              Directly government-funded healthcare and government-run single payer insurance are essentially the same thing. There’s some rationale for keeping the government-run single payer system (whether you call it insurance or not) at arm’s length from the sitting government to prevent too much political chaotic nonsense each time another government takes power, but they achieve the same things in terms of health care delivery and risk management.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Sounds like he’s trying to cast everyone else but the insurance companies as the bad organizations, and that they will be taking measures to make that more clear to the people.

      In short “don’t shoot us, shoot these other guys if you have to shoot someone!”