Is the US system of health insurance just socialized healthcare with less bargaining power? Is there any real advantage to it?
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Healthcare varies tremendously from state to state. The insurance companies have tremendous bargaining power. I live in MA and our #2 & #3 just merged. So now two companies cover the majority of the population.
Both are non for profit and have a 2% operating budget, so they are really motivated to negotiate lower prices from providers.
there is more bargaining power since insurance companies compete against each other. If you have a decent non-government health insurance, you get good care at reasonable cost.
There is less barganing power when negotiating prices of drugs, but drugs are less than 20% of overall healthcare cost.
The problems are duplication of effort in insurance industry, and its profit margins. Other problems are things like young and health that can opt out of insurance, making premiums higher for those who do. And hospitals that are required to provide free emergency care, so they are acting as insurers, except nobody pays them for it, so they try to make money any way they can.
More or less. It’s basically socialized healthcare, but nearly exclusive to workers, and not every worker either, just a sizable portion of full timers. In a sense, it’s kinda closer to the ideals of socialism than most socialized systems. As far as bargaining power, it’s certainly less, but there’s also less government in charge which tends to raise costs too, so who knows if that ends up balancing out or not.
There’s no real advantage to a system like this, to be honest, other than that it’s easy to impliment politically. It’s a Frankenstein, it’s small pieces of populist ideas mashed together, and just monsterous overall. It’s at the point that abolishing health insurance all together would likely be a huge net benefit to everybody.
The “advantage” is it gives your employer a huge amount of power over you and gets insurance companies rich.
Recently there was a graph on Reddit showing the correlation between healthcare spending and life expectancy between different countries. The USA was a huge outlier with high spending and low life expectancy. There is a huge difference between the best medical care existing in the US and people getting the best medical care.
I wouldn’t say it’s socialized, no. First it’s for profit. Secondly there isn’t equal access. One part of the original ACA (aka Obamacare) was to prevent insurance companies from charging more for preexisting conditions but that got scrapped or weakened.
I see your point though, that if everyone is paying for it out of their paychecks, then isn’t that basically the same as a tax.
Is there any advantage to what? The (current) version of the US healthcare system? Yes. New drugs are expensive to make, most do not make it to market. In the United States the ability to actually make a profit on a new pharmaceutical allows for innovation that would not appear without such a motive because the sunk costs are too high.
Allowing physicians to make more money by seeing more patients, or by offering better services or amenities means that consumers get more choices.
The population of Canada is about 38million, the population of Tennessee is about 6.7 million. There are more MRI machines in Tennessee than there are in all of Canada. In my small state if I go to my doctor in the morning, like the first hour they are open, and he prescribes an MRI, if I am willing to make 4 phone calls, there is a high liklihood that I can have that MRI done that same day.
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