Sooner we remove profits from Healthcare, the better off we all will be.
I just appreciate Bertolini making it clear as possible that Aetna will leave the exchanges if their merger with Humana is not approved by the Feds, which they believe will harm competition. Same guy who a few months earier was saying how well Aetna was doing with ACA.
It's all about the benjamins. At some point in the future, Healthcare will bankrupt our country...that is when the fun begins.
Lol. Yeah bc all we need is every hospital operating as smoothly as the VA. Do you go to a private practice doctor, or to the health department? Why? Do you think new devices are developed and innovation is spurred bc of the goodness of everyones heart...or bc of the competition created by the free market? For example, outside of healthcare..do you think the guy who invented vacuums did so bc he wanted everyone to have a clean house? No, he did so bc of the opportunity in the market and then he could sell it to make money...otherwise he would have just made one for himself and quit. No different with anything else. The point being,You do realize everything that you own or exists..unless natural, exists because of money....or else it wouldn't exist.
Back to healthcare...insurance companies don't hold the power...that's the misconception pushed by the left. After all the government started medicare which is used as a price point for everyone. If that was eliminated you would have competition.
The dirty truth about American health care is that it costs more not because insurers are so powerful, but because they’re so weak.
In the U.S., insurers negotiate with hospitals and drug companies on their own -- and they pay more as a result. In fact, because of their weak negotiating position they frequently use whatever price Medicare is paying as a baseline and then, because they lack the power to strike a similar deal, add a percentage on top. Joshua Gottlieb, an economist at the University of British Columbia, found that when Medicare increases what it pays for a service by $1, private insurers increase their payments by $1.30.
That leaves the U.S. with the worst of both approaches: Prices aren’t set by the market, but they also aren’t set by the government. Consequently, Medicare’s negotiating power is weakened by the threat that drug companies or hospitals will opt to do business only with higher-paying private insurers. We simultaneously miss out on the efficiency of a purely private system and on the savings of a purely public one.
If insurers lose on negotiating with medical providers, however, they’re much better than the government at innovating on insurance design. Co-pays and deductibles aren’t popular, but they work. Many insurers are experimenting with ways to create incentives for better health, including using personal technology -- everything from e-mails to smartphone cameras. (The disastrous introduction of the Obama administration’s HealthCare.gov website hardly instills confidence in the government’s capacity to exploit digital medicine with similar efficiency.)
neither Medicare nor Canada has done anything innovative on the delivery side. Taiwan is trying a little bit but not a whole lot. By and large they just pay bills.” The limitations of single-payer systems became clear during the health-care debate, when the Congressional Budget Office projected that premiums for a public option would be higher than premiums for private insurance -- unless a public option could avail itself of Medicare’s pricing power.
A health-care system that followed international best practices would direct the government to set rates. Or it would let insurers band together and negotiate rates collectively -- a practice called “all-payer rate setting.” But it wouldn’t need to eliminate private insurers. It’s good for consumers to have a choice of insurers, who have real incentives to innovate and devise better ways to keep customers healthy and costs down.
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