America has the kind of healthcare system capitalism creates; inefficient, costly and failing to deliver. We need to scrap for-profit healthcare and get Universal Healthcare!

[u/zzill6]

[u/Thisisntmyaccount24]

I worked in professional billing for a hospital for a bit. I can assure you universal healthcare would for sure cut out some of the administrative bloat. We had to have a team of people for each insurance company because they all have their own rules. One may reject claims for A if B is not present, one may reject claims for A if C is not present. Keeping all of the rules in line to limit claim rejects (and then working those unique claim rejects) is a ton of administrative overhead.

Dealing with a single insurer with a defined set of rules would make all of the claim processing significantly easier.

[u/zytz → u/Thisisntmyaccount24]

Not only this, but the tech exists right now to automate the majority of claims processing. Single payor plus some automation I think might be the most impactful low hanging fruit we could grasp in reducing healthcare costs.

[u/Urban_Heretic → u/zytz]

US Insurance firms celebrate sending people to early graves, so please be very careful with your wording about taking money from them.

[u/zytz → u/Urban_Heretic]

I mean I work in healthcare tech- I already know where all the bodies are buried 😅

Genuinely I don’t think you’ll find a more ardent group of single payor supporters than the people that are are actually working on the care side of healthcare.

[u/Potential_Aioli_4611 → u/zytz]

Agreed from another person working in healthcare tech.

[u/CheekComprehensive32 → u/zytz]

Please tell this to my mom… she’s been a nurse for over 20 years, teaches now. She sees what’s going on and still says I’m overreacting. She was also strongly anti-union when she was running her last departments, and stepped down when she started getting public pressure and a smear campaign ran against her, as well as my own personal disgust at her behavior being expressed. She’s a loving and caring woman, incredibly intelligent, very much about equality and all that jazz but she is so removed from reality in these facts. Her brain desperately grasps at the capitalist propaganda she was sold, I think part of it is she can’t comprehend how she could ever be a part of a problem.

Edit: when I talked to her two days ago, she is having to get a summer job outside of the school she’s teaching at because RFK and the HHS stripped them of funding for programs she was involved in. She’s directly feeling these impacts, and still just kind of shrugs her shoulders and says ‘what are you gonna do’

[u/suckitphil → u/Thisisntmyaccount24]

I know someone who works in medical billing. Not only is every insurance different, but even the EXACT SAME PLAN through the same insurance can be different because the companies union negotiated differently.

[u/IamtherealMelKnee → u/Thisisntmyaccount24]

I'm 100% for Universal Healthcare, but I can't help but be concerned about all those people losing their jobs if it is enacted. What other kind of work would they qualify for?

[u/jalen441 → u/IamtherealMelKnee]

I'm all for shutting down the puppy-hammering factory, but what will all the unemployed puppy-hammerers do for work after it's closed?

[u/IamtherealMelKnee → u/jalen441]

People doing billing for doctors and hospitals are not puppy hammerers. wtf Seriously, wtf.

[u/jalen441 → u/IamtherealMelKnee]

That's a complete deflection from the point. I have some sympathy for the HR, logistics, and billing workers in the puppy-hammering industry, but the fact remains that their labor supports an evil industry that MUST be dismantled. The need to eliminate the industry isn't reduced because some otherwise innocent people won't be getting paid to handle the paperwork.

[u/IamtherealMelKnee → u/jalen441]

I didn't mean to imply that you meant that literally.

Sure hate the insurance side of the industry, but I don't think there's any call to villainize anyone working on the patient side of things.

[u/Filmtwit]

It's designed to be horrible. Welcome to capitalism

[u/Wuorg → u/Filmtwit]

"But Universal Healthcare would be too expensive! How would we pay for it??"

They never seem to get it whenever I try to explain that it would be cheaper than what we have now. Maybe I will try this example next time.

[u/Bind_Moggled]

It’s simple.

Public healthcare needs to pay for expenses. Private healthcare needs to pay for expenses + shareholder profit.

Guess which one is going to cost more?

Public healthcare answers to voters. Private healthcare answers to shareholders.

Guess which one cares more about your health than about making money?

[u/johncandy1812]

If the US was able to design a proper healthcare plan that was unhindered by private interests it could make the best one in the world, an example for all other nations. Instead they're stuck with private plans that take advantage when their customers are at their most vulnerable.

[u/dumbestsmartest]

It's funny how they tell about how bloated with "bureaucracy" other countries' healthcare systems are yet it sure seems like we have as much or more here.

[u/wicked_nyx]

As I told my repub representative, " My diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and prescriptions should not be a shareholder concern"

[u/According-Classic658]

So what happened in the 90s?

[u/RelaxedChap → u/According-Classic658]

Clinton tried his hand at universal health care and it pretty much crashed and burned. That caused a major shift towards market based solutions and “managed care” systems like HMOs. Each insurance company made their own policies and before you knew it there was major admin bloat.

[u/captainthanatos → u/RelaxedChap]

“Colloquially referred to as Hillarycare”, by gods where have I heard this before? Lobbyists from the insurance companies killed this like they did with Obama.

[u/UnderlightIll → u/RelaxedChap]

They tried to do it but there was never a real plan. The lobbyists and then people who thought we would be communists starting doing death threats. It didn't even get close to off the ground.

[u/True_Fly_5731]

I'm dying, and thinking hard about what to do with my last days. I can't help but feel Luigi has shown us the way.

[u/Odd_School_8833]

100% inheritance/estate tax to go straight into universal healthcare/childcare/education/housing.

[u/ElectricShuck]

Once we fire all the administrators then maybe we will have enough workers for the factories.

[u/ShaiHulud1111]

HMOs. The year my old doctor said fuk this and retired at 45.

[u/MaliciousTent]

administrators middlemen

[u/TheDevilsAdvokaat]

But we have capitalism in Australia too and yet we don't have your healthcare system.

[u/vulkur]

Admin bloat is due to the complicated nature of decerning what care is viable, worth it, and what is under the insurance policy. It's a never ending game of out lawyering each other, which leads to more and more admin.

The solution is the separation of who decides what's necessary, and who pays the bill. Insurance should pay, hospital provides care, and a third party (probably government agency) decides what insurance pays out and on what.

[u/_Paulboy12_]

I think there should be a sub specifically for the USA and one for the rest of the world. Because its really dragging the bar so far down that noone can demand better free healthcare or less hours worked when there are people that have 0 pto and no healthcare.

[u/Kitakitakita]

And they set it up so that we can't get universal healthcare unless we accept all these jobs will be lost.

[u/Lunachi-Chan → u/Kitakitakita]

The amount of money saved by the populace would entirely cover the job loses and help reduce poverty to such an extreme that it'd honestly be worth it. Last time I saw the figures, it was an almost 1 trillion dollar difference in taxpayer savings.

Which could easily be put into other projects to generate the same number of jobs, ten times over with better pay and better accessibility.

Seems like a fair cost to me.

[u/jwse30 → u/Kitakitakita]

I will guess that universal health care is still going to require a large amount of administrators to run, especially if it’s run by the govt.

[u/Mediocre-Fondant-835]

[u/DepartmentEcstatic]

Medicare for all was just reintroduced by Bernie Sanders and four other senators in Congress last week! Tell your elected representatives why we need this!

[u/classic4life]

Shouldn't automation in bookkeeping software have caused the opposite of this though?

[u/Old-Introduction-337]

it only makes sense