Have you ever held a job?
The fingers on your hand mainly point back at you when you point at someone else.
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You are WAY behind here. I worked for a US capital eqpt mfr. They had lost money each year for all the years before I started. Took one look and began the turnaround. Set up internal systems to enable profitability. First year after I started, the company broke even or even had a small profit. Appropriately profitable the next four years. Then I left (owner figured I was no longer needed). They were out of business less than ten years after I left.
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Yeah, and the same goes for the for profit housing industry!!! And that includes anyone involved in the housing industry, developers, land traders, infrastructure install, all of it. They are all out to earn a profit off of the basic need of housing. Oh and also the food industry! They also ALL attempt to profit off of a most basic need of all people, including CHILDREN!
And to make matters worse, according to Maslow’s hierarchy, food and shelter are even more basic needs than healthcare.
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You’re being intellectually lazy. Not all profitable ventures are good for society. Good government helps protect its citizens from greedy corporations.
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What’s your point? Governments often subsidize and regulate to ensure their citizens’ basic needs are met. Is that a bad thing?
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Someone mentioned that the healthcare industry profits from providing healthcare and that it is “bane on our society”. The only point I made is that the housing and food industry similarly profit off of basic human needs.
I didn’t mention anything about government in my comment.
Yeah, that was me, sort of. Please don’t be coy.
When corporate profits and shareholder value are prioritized over providing adequate health care, people suffer. That seems fairly intuitive, no? Heck, isn’t that what the US is currently experiencing?
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It all depends on if you have a honest market for goods & services and price competition. That’s lacking across large swaths of US industry and business.
When I first moved to Houston in 1981, you had Albertsons, Krogers, Safeway and two large Texas chains competing in the Houston market and no one had more than a 15% market share. Houston was probably the cheapest place in the nation to buy groceries. Forty-plus years of lack of antitrust enforcement has led to consolidation, fewer players, and higher prices.
It’s worse in health care. It’s almost impossible to get competitive pricing on anything. In the few instances where you can (e.g., pricing a generic drug on GoodRx) you’ll often find that the insurance company is charging 2 to 10 times the GoodRx price. The levels of scam, skim and fraud are obscene.
The fraud of Medicare Advantage (MA) is well documented. But even Medigap (which is a better deal than MA) has a large fraudulent component.
Medicare does all the benefit administration and accounting for your for-profit Medigap insurer. All the insurer does is pay what Medicare tells them to pay, collect your premium, and skim an average of 20% of premiums paid as overhead & profit – 20% for essentially doing nothing.
Since Medicare is doing all the work and has all the actuarial data, they could easily offer you a Medigap plan with the same 1.2% overhead of regular Medicare saving you 19% or so. It’s just simply “rent seeking” behavior on the part of the insurance industry with no benefit to the customer or patient.
intercst
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I don’t reply to “people”, I reply to comments. I don’t even look at who wrote what. So I literally had no idea who wrote the comment I replied to.
Same with the homeless and the lack of affordable housing.
What part of my comments are you disagreeing with???
If you’re saying that for profit housing and food also take advantage of people to boost profits, I agree with you.
Healthcare should not be a luxury item. It needs to be considered a human right.
It is neither, and confused terms used for sloganeering are a big part of the problem with our politics.
Health care is primarily a social concern, and there is little case to be made for it as a human right. The term “human right” has a long and crucial history, but becomes weakend when applied to such things as housing, healthcare, and education. All those are crucial for any successful population in modern times, but cruxness does not create a right, just a very persuasive argument for sane reasoned policies.
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Human rights need to extend to economic rights.
I agree with the need to provide people with an economic floor, but as a matter of political good judgement, not as a consequence of the recognition of human rights, a morally and historically significantly different category anchored in religion, being, and social identity rather than economics.
Why? Because arguing for significant economic support based on historic human rights succeeds with many but by no means a majority. Successfully socialist societies (the nordics!) tackled the question of economic justice head on as a political issue, making a different set of political and moral arguments than those used earlier against chattel slavery, male control over females, state sponsored religion, racist distinctions etc. They actually argued that acceptance of poverty is socially and politically wrong and needs to be tackled with social programs rooted in political decisions
Heck, I might be wrong, but I have spent my life organizing on “the left”, and have been repeatedly dismayed by what I see as a weakening of respect for crucial hard won human rights by trying to mis-apply their concepts to issues of economic well-being.
Here is a good dense compendium on the background issues of rights.
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Can’t it be both? I agree that social safety net programs are often justified because they’re the “right thing to do”. That’s only half of the argument.
YES! I am in complete agreement. It IS the “right thing to do” as far as our deepest religious and moral comprehension goes, but as Stalin enquired of the Pope “How many tank divisions does he have?”
The buttons in the minds of the body politic that need pushing now are those as to the huge enormous waste of economic power and prosperity due to our lack of basic health, socialization, quality education, and day to day life security, and not so much those reminding each voter that god(s) love their neighbors just as much as them…. and no rational argument should make johnny rich boy far far far more likely to live long and prosper than jackie poor girl….
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I’m starting to think that if you’re in a business where you have to pull your corporate bio from your website even though you work at a different company in a different state in a different position … maybe you want to reexamine your life choices.
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I have no clue how you are using that.
Human rights need to include medical, education, and pensions(to a better extent than now).
The way you are using rights as a term refers to legal rights. A balancing act between powerful interests. It allows for individual protections.
Even if you mean something else that is what we have as rights.
The wealth in Western societies has gone much further but we know we are taking too much from our fellow citizens. That is an abuse of power.
I think its wrong to overly criticize the health insurance industry. They do guide to use limited resources more efficiently. That is a positive contribution.
We cannot expect then to cover every treatment someone can think of.
We hope they make responsible choices when clients are in need of care.
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Paul,
Honestly none of the above.
Criticize? They are not costing you when they don’t pay a claim they cover generally.
Limited resources? They limit the resources even more by taking something that should not be theirs, admin and profits.
Treatments? Sorry not really the issue. We are not trained in medicine. But coverage is coverage. Denials to make more money are denials of coverage. 1000s of people die as a result every year. Profits are profits. That is their morality not yours or mine.
Hope? It will cost you. They are not honest actors.
This is business. Nothing to do with medicine. The bottom line at someone else’s expense.
We are the only Western country without universal care. The reason we won’t share with African Americans. Doubt that? Read our constitution carefully to find out how we began. We still as a nation are limiting African Americans and in doing so limiting ourselves.
When we think of welfare in private plenty of people I have known have pointed at African Americans even though the rural areas are poorer and take more welfare.
Everything you said that I am rebutting is why the rest of the Western nations have universal care.
30k dead this year underinsured or not insured as the cause. Decade after decade.
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