Comment #1, the closest to actually answering the questions.
" Q1: What was United Healthcare's profit margin for the most recent year with available data?
I don't know. You? I have taken NO POSITION on what UH profit margin was, have I?
Q2: Is that profit margin excessive?
I
don't know. You? I don't think I believe that the healthcare for profit
model is a just or reasonable or effective one. I'll provide a link
below. So, it's not about how much they do or don't make, it's about
whether the SYSTEM of for-profit health schemes is
effective/healthy/helpful or not.
Q3: If so, by what definition?
I'm not dealing with their profit margin and have not staked a position on their profit margin... have I?
My
concern is that the health care for-profit model as exists in the US
has negative results, keeps people away from healthcare and results in
less-healthy people, including many who die for lack of healthcare
(amongst other reasons).
Q4-Q7: Please show objective data that
"for profit" health insurance causes "so much harm"? Please show with
objective data what exactly "so much harm" is? Please show with
objective data, how you determine that "so much harm" is specifically
caused only by "for profit" insurance? Please show with objective data,
how "so much harm" exceeds some objective standard of harm?
"The
U.S. ranks last on four of five health outcome measures. Life
expectancy is more than four years below the 10-country average, and the
U.S. has the highest rates of preventable and treatable deaths for all
ages as well as excess deaths related to the pandemic for people under
age 75."
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2024/sep/mirror-mirror-2024
For one source with some objective measures and data. Having people die at a younger rate in significant numbers IS harm to me.
More
sources with more objective data... like the reality that we pay TWICE
as much for healthcare on average per person but die younger:
https://healthsystemsfacts.org/
Or another source of data:
"Another way to transform America’s failing healthcare system is to address the high rate of insurance claim denials."
This
link notes that the US actually improved in health equity in the last
15 years... thanks to ACA/Obamacare, which Trump and the GOP has
committed so much effort to try to undermine or remove.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2024/12/07/how-the-american-healthcare-system-is-failing-its-people/
How much data would you like?"
Comment #2 Just a note. This is clearly not Dan answering the questions "as..asked..to do". It's Dan trying to throw a flood of crap against the wall to avoid answering the actual questions as he'd been asked to and simply trying to exert control.
"Continuing with providing hard, objective data to answer Craig's question, as he asked me to do:
"More than 26 260 Americans aged 25 to 64 died in 2006 because they lacked health insurance"
But
what of those who don't have insurance in the UK, France, the
Netherlands, etc... Oh, wait. They ALL have universal health insurance.
My son who got sick while in Peace Corps in the relatively poor nation
of Albania was able to be treated... because ALBANIA has universal
health care, and he wasn't even a citizen! Same for when he was in
Taiwan.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2323087/
I'd say 26,000 people dying a year due to our health system is a problem and a legitimate harm. Do you think so?
More:
"Main takeaways include:
*
About half of U.S. adults say it is difficult to afford health care
costs, and one in four say they or a family member in their household
had problems paying for health care in the past 12 months. Younger
adults, those with lower incomes, adults in fair or poor health, and the
uninsured are particularly likely to report problems affording health
care in the past year...
* The cost of prescription drugs prevents some people from filling prescriptions. About one in five adults (21%) say they have not filled a prescription because of the cost...
* Those who are covered by health insurance are not immune to the burden of health care costs. About half (48%) of insured adults worry about affording their monthly health insurance premium...
* Health care debt is a burden for a large share of Americans. About four in ten adults (41%) report having debt due to medical or dental bills including debts owed to credit cards...
https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/americans-challenges-with-health-care-costs/
As
you can see, aside from the harms, illness and death that come from not
having universal health care, there are also the harms of the wildly
more expensive health care - harms to the economy writ large, harms to
household economies and harms to healthcare due to not being able to
afford medicines and treatments.
You don't have that so much with universal healthcare systems, apparently. Or so, the data seems to say."
Comment #3 This is an obvious straw man. I had asked him to answer specific questions in specific ways, nothing else.
" So... you're wanting me to provide support that I don't have about claims I have not made because... why?
Would
you like for me to address concerns about long-term space travel on
human bodies and how that might impact proposed colonization of Mars,
too... or other topics I haven't raised?
That's strange."
Comment #4
" Okay, addressing YOUR questions that have nothing to do with ANYTHING I've said, here's one source:
Despite
significant initial financial losses in the individual market after the
key provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) took effect,
health insurer profitability in the individual market has risen due to substantial premium increases,
government
premium tax credits that pay for those premium increases, and the
large, government-funded, Medicaid expansion. Since ACA
implementation on January 1, 2014, health insurance stocks outperformed the S&P 500 by 106 percent."
And who is this sketchy source where I found this?
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/The-Profitability-of-Health-Insurance-Companies.pdf
Ha.
Or,
how about a whistleblower FROM the health industry, talking about the
great costs of the for-profit/Wall Street/pay investors strategy of
health insurance companies:
Restricting patients’ access to
needed care made UnitedHealth, Cigna and a handful of other big insurers
Wall Street darlings, and made lots of people lots of money while doing
little to enhance care...
Hundreds of acquisitions later,
UnitedHealth is now the fourth largest U.S. company — just behind
Walmart, Amazon, and Apple. At the end of trading on Monday of this
week, the share price was $560.62.
That’s an increase of more than 2,100% since June 24, 2009.
By comparison, the Dow Jones average has increased 438%.
https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/11/wall-street-unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-brian-thompson/"
Comment #5
"More:
United Healthcare reported a
historic profit of $16.4 billion in the previous year.
This
profit comes not from inventive, groundbreaking medical technology. It
arises from accumulating substantial insurance premiums and subsequently
failing to provide the promised benefits when customers seek to redeem
those benefits. Why should a customer who spends $10,000 annually on
health insurance be denied medication or a medical treatment deemed
medically necessary by their physician simply because the insurer
disagrees with the physician’s assessment?
Now, I'm done
answering questions about something I haven't stated a position on. Feel
free to deal with the data I've provided or not. I'm telling you what
is obvious: Large numbers of people in the US across the political
spectrum are angry about how our health insurance companies provide care
and services.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/09/29/increasing-share-of-americans-favor-a-single-government-program-to-provide-health-care-coverage/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx
As
to your question about me not saying if this guy being shot is bad, I
simply would point you to my CONSISTENT position. ANY TIME you hear that
someone innocent was harmed or killed, what is my position? It's wrong.
That's
true whether it's a wealthy white CEO or the people harmed by lack of
equitable health insurance. So you have no reason to wonder, "What does
Dan think of the morality of this man being assassinated?" Dan's
position is consistent: IT'S WRONG to assassinate people. It's WRONG to
bomb innocent civilians. IT'S WRONG to cut off aid to starving people.
IT'S WRONG to enslave people.
I'm consistent.
It's the advantage of having a consistent ethical worldview. You don't need to wonder what my position is."
When ~9% of the population has no health care, people die younger and in the order of tens of thousands of fellow citizens. That number of uninsured was closer to 15% back prior to Obamacare, but we've made great advances in that front (unless the GOP/Magop manage to finally undo those advances). Those tens of thousands of annual deaths ARE harm. It doesn't matter how much the insurance companies makes or doesn't make. The system is flawed.
When large numbers of people (including many WITH health insurance) can't afford their treatments or medicines, that causes harm. Regardless of how little or how much profit the insurance and pharma industries make.
When large numbers of people are denied treatments recommended by their doctors, THAT causes harm, regardless of insurance company profits.
Part of the problem IS the connection to profits, but not solely. In a system (regardless of how much profit companies are making) that a FOR-PROFIT business is dependent on keeping costs down SO THAT they make a profit, there is incentive for them to deny treatments and medications. Listening to the anger across the US, surely you recognize this. The system itself motivates worse care.
And this is borne out by various studies and reports by a variety of experts in the field and which is based upon hard numbers.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality-u-s-healthcare-system-compare-countries/
https://www.who.int/news/item/07-02-2000-world-health-organization-assesses-the-world%27s-health-systems
The point being, once again, is I was not talking about the profit margin and I STILL don't know the profit margin of UH, because that was not the point I was addressing. I was addressing the SYSTEM and looking at hard data comparing us to other wealthy nations.
Also, it would be one thing if the US was doing poorly with our private for-profit system and so was everyone else. But when we know it can be done better and with less harmful outcomes, why would we not do it better?
"God has scattered the proud in their conceit.
God has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
God has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich have been sent away empty..."
"...listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter."
"Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me."
People have this natural abhorrence of the abuses of and molestations by the rich and powerful and some sense (that serious, even literal, readings of scripture would seem to affirm) that such abusers SHOULD be punished.
Which, AGAIN, is not me affirming this awful action alleged to have been done by this privileged white man from a conservative family. I can do two things at the same time: Condemn the assassination completely AND condemn the system which frustrates and harms so many more people than this one man.
Reporting in the Wall Street Journal has found that these private insurance companies, which cover more than a third of American seniors on Medicare,
collect hundreds of billions of dollars from the government annually and
overbill Medicare to the tune of around ten billion dollars per year;
UnitedHealthcare has
used litigation to fight its obligation to repay fees that were overpaid [sounds strikingly familiar for the corrupt pervert the GOP put back in power - Dan].
In 2020, UnitedHealth acquired a company called NaviHealth, whose software provides algorithmic care recommendations for sick patients, and which is now used to help manage its Medicare Advantage program. A 2023 class-action lawsuit alleges that the NaviHealth algorithm has a
“known error rate” of ninety per cent and
cites appalling patient stories:
one man in Tennessee broke his back, was hospitalized for six days, was moved to a nursing home for eleven days, and then was informed by UnitedHealth that his care would be cut off in two days.
(UnitedHealth says the lawsuit is unmerited.)
After a couple rounds of appeals and reversals,
the man left the nursing home and died four days later.
This murder was bad. Awful. Wrong. The treatment/abuse of thousands/tens of thousands/more US citizens and our neighbors... the deaths, bankruptcies, crushing debt and ill-health produced by our health system are LIKEWISE, wrong. Perhaps even worse, if you want to try to measure evil. The actions of one apparently frustrated perhaps conservative wealthy man who may have been done wrong by an insurance company (remains to be seen) is awful, but one can understand the frustration.
The actions of people in insurance companies and just the system itself which produce all of the harms noted in your article (and more) is truly awful and not understandable.
It's the difference between a father who killed the man who raped his daughter and which rapist was never convicted (wrong, but one can understand the frustration) and the actions of serial rapists (wrong and in no way understandable... it's just evil and sick).
I DON'T KNOW. I don't tend to make claims about things as if they were a fact about things I don't know. Again, distaste/dislike/disdain for insurance companies is not a partisan thing. I have NO data to guess that the majority or all are coming from liberals or conservatives, any more than you do. I suspect both.
But what about the concerns being raised in such a harsh way by SO many people across the country (and probably across political lines)? They've been denied services their doctor recommends, they've gone bankrupt, they've had to choose between medicine and food, they've sometimes died or died younger than they should have according to the data. Will you express NO sympathy for these thousands, tens of thousands of people suffering so?
That goes both ways.
“I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers,” someone commented on TikTok, a response that got more than fifteen thousand likes. “Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage,” another person wrote, under an Instagram post from CNN. On X, someone posted, with the caption “My official response to the UHC CEO’s murder,” an infographic comparing wealth distribution in late eighteenth-century France to wealth distribution in present-day America."
Again, I ask you a rather simple question: DO YOU HAVE ANY DATA THAT SAYS ALL OR EVEN MOST of the people acting rudely about this man's murder are liberals? Anonymous comments on TikTok does not data make.
If you have no proof that this is primarily a liberal thing, then just admit as much. There's no harm in being straightforward. I'm glad to say that I do not know if these abusive comments are from mostly liberal or mostly conservative types... or perhaps regular people with no huge political leanings, but who are amongst the many actively harmed by our health insurance system (and again: DATA: "HARMED" in the sense that tens of thousands of people from lack of health insurance... in the sense that people go bankrupt, that they can't afford their medications which leads to physical and financial harm).
My guess is that most of the abusive comments are from mostly non-political people who've just been harmed or view themselves as harmed by the medical system in general and insurance companies specifically. For instance, ALL the times that your doctors recommend Treatment A but then, an anonymous insurance expert says, "No, we don't agree with your doctor who has actually been with you and knows your case... request denied!" What the hell kind of arrogance is that? HOW is that a just or rational system?
Just admit you have no proof for your theory and move on. That's the rational, adult way to handle such mistakes.
It is a tragedy that this man was murdered
by a privileged white man
from an apparently conservative background.
and:
Murder is wrong.
Where in that do you even begin to read into my words... "But secretly, I idolize him..."?
The issue is whether or not some number of people being some degree of annoyed is justification to kill someone.
No. No. Of course, it's not. Don't be obtuse. I've ALWAYS been consistent on this: Causing harm/killing/enslaving others is wrong. I'm the one that's been consistent. You're the one that says, "Well, sometimes slavery is okay. Sometimes killing babies and children and other innocent bystanders is okay. Sometimes bombing a whole city full of innocent people is okay."
Understand this: I AM CONSISTENTLY OPPOSED TO KILLING PEOPLE. So, go ahead and ask, "Well, though, do you think that THIS guy should have been assassinated?" My answer is what it always it: I AM CONSISTENTLY OPPOSED TO KILLING PEOPLE.
You're the one with wishy washy hunches about when it's okay to slaughter even innocent children and babes and when it's not.
You clearly seem to lean (maybe slightly) toward the side that is idolizing this guy.
Of course, I don't. I have never said anything like that. Good Lord. Do you have a reading comprehension problem?
What words have I used to make you think I "idolize" this sick, sad man?
I'LL BE BLOCKING ALL COMMENTS ON THIS POST, AND MODERATING ANY COMMENTS ON THE OTHER POST THAT RELATE TO THESE COMMENTS. UNFORTUNATELY DAN'S CHOICE NOT TO DO AS HE WAS ASKED, HAS RESULTED IN CONSEQUENCES.
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