Lemme guess … you consider yourself in the middle class, and by your statement, are a victim. I suspect that if you were poor or old, then the middle class would “be all set”.
On occasion … or two, I’ve been accused of being wrong, so …
IIRC, you’re a vet. You know how to adapt and overcome. I have confidence in your ability to do so. Vote for your country and not for yourself. It will pay off in your lifetime.
Here’s one way to “overcome”/cope
Fine line b/t genius and madness. He could have done what fellow UPenn alum Elon did but instead:
It does show current system is broken. Not too many Canadian CEOs being shot
He had a beef with United Healthcare. His mom had some bad nerve condition and getting coverage and treatment for it was a big mess.
The high copays made consistent treatment impossible. New treatments were denied as “not medically necessary.” Old treatments didn’t work, and still put us out for thousands of dollars.
UnitedHealthcare constantly changed their claim filing procedure. They said my mother’s doctor needed to fax his notes. Then UnitedHealthcare said they did not save faxed patient correspondence, and required a hardcopy of the doctor’s typed notes to be mailed. Then they said they never received the notes. They were unable to approve the claim until they had received and filed the notes.
They promised coverage, and broke their word to my mother.
Honestly, sounds par for the course for dealing with insurance. You have to really ride these guys if you want your benefits, which is often difficult if you’re the one with a bad medical condition.
But you shouldn’t have to. This is wrong, and nobody gives a shit. Maybe now they’ll start?
Democratic politicians, particularly Obama, pushed insurance companies to lower premiums. The way you lower premiums is by paying out fewer benefits, since the amount of health issues people have is roughly constant. So either you make the people pay more due to all the healthcare inflation, or you deny them some benefits/coverage, leading them to consume less healthcare and have worse health. Or I guess you can try the European/Canadian kinder gentler approach, where you definitely cover everything you just have to wait two years to get the procedure and lots of people die before they can get it.
You pay with your money or you pay with your life.
You can also lower premiums by lowering the # of middlemen getting paid millions/billions, having hundreds of different plans/variants
It would be nice to have a real cash system so you could just go to doctors and pay for it, instead of incurring all this overhead of insurance authorizations and paperwork and benefits denials. That wastes a ton of employee time on all sides.
Of course most people still need / want insurance in case they have some 6 figure medical issue they can’t afford, so insurance is a necessary evil I guess.
Yup. A lot of primary care is going that way, I’m even thinking of just getting Medicare A for my parents and paying OOP for the rest. They have a concierge PCP.
They pay high IRMMA premiums and additional penalties for not signing up (moved here in their 80s )
I think what’s actually happening is that they promise to provide benefits/coverage, but then they delay approvals and deny payments for the promised coverage. The way I see it is they must either not promise that coverage in the first place or they must process all claims expediently and fairly.
delay deny depose…
We need to just have catastrophic insurance. Take prevention and primary care out of it. It will simplify things for patients and providers too
From what I’ve read, catastrophic costs a lot more than preventive. I don’t think it’s a good idea to wait until someone is about to die before treating them.
one would pay preventive/routine OOP
Just have Part A, for all
More “middlemen” shenanigans
Right, that gets the extra overhead and corporate profits out of at least that portion of the normal premiums so should lower costs overall. You don’t need insurance for routine and preventive care - it’s expected so it’s dumb to insure it and pay extra costs with little to no risk pooling benefit.
Now if you can’t even afford your routine medical checkups, I guess that’s what Medicaid is for (poor people).
Part of the manifesto:
Back then I thought there was nothing I could do. The high copays made consistent treatment impossible. New treatments were denied as “not medically necessary.” Old treatments didn’t work, and still put us out for thousands of dollars.
UnitedHealthcare limited specialist consultations to twice a year. Then they refused to cover advanced imaging, which the specialists required for an appointment.
Prior authorizations took weeks, then months. UnitedHealthcare constantly changed their claim filing procedure. They said my mother’s doctor needed to fax his notes. Then UnitedHealthcare said they did not save faxed patient correspondence, and required a hardcopy of the doctor’s typed notes to be mailed. Then they said they never received the notes. They were unable to approve the claim until they had received and filed the notes.
They promised coverage, and broke their word to my mother.
With every delay, my anger surged. With every denial, I wanted to throw the doctor through the glass wall of their hospital waiting room.
But it wasn’t them. It wasn’t the doctors, the receptionists, administrators, pharmacists, imaging technicians, or anyone we ever met. It was UnitedHealthcare. People are dying. Evil has become institutionalized. Corporations make billions of dollars off the pain, suffering, death, and anguished cries in the night of millions of Americans.
We entered into an agreement for healthcare with a legally binding contract that promised care commensurate with our insurance payments and medical needs. Then UnitedHealthcare changes the rules to suit their own profits. They think they make the rules, and think that because it’s legal that no one can punish them. They think there’s no one out there who will stop them.
Now my own chronic back pain wakes me in the night, screaming in pain. I sought out another type of healing that showed me the real antidote to what ails us. I bide my time, saving the last of my strength to strike my final blows. All extractors must be forced to swallow the bitter pain they deal out to millions. As our own chief executives, it’s our obligation to make our own lives better. First and foremost, we must seek to improve our own circumstances and defend ourselves. As we do so, our actions have ripple effects that can improve the lives of others. Rules exist between two individuals, in a network that covers the entire earth. Some of these rules are written down. Some of these rules emerge from natural respect between two individuals. Some of these rules are defined in physical laws, like the properties of gravity, magnetism or the potential energy stored in the chemical bonds of potassium nitrate.
No single document better encapsulates the belief that all people are equal in fundamental worth and moral status and the frameworks for fostering collective well-being than the US constitution.
Writing a rule down makes it into a law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. Law means nothing. What does matter is following the guidance of our own logic and what we learn from those before us to maximize our own well-being, which will then maximize the well-being of our loved ones and community.
That’s where UnitedHealthcare went wrong. They violated their contract with my mother, with me, and tens of millions of other Americans. This threat to my own health, my family’s health, and the health of our country’s people requires me to respond with an act of war. END
It’s interesting that he was rich himself, not on Medicaid etc. That’s what broken in our system
For my dad’s rehab, the provider refused to accept my credit card while insurance was denied, and we fought appeals. So we were literally at their mercy
Atleast he’ll have good attorneys
So go back to 15 years ago?
I agree, I really liked my $25k deductable plan for $30/month.
The whole idea of catastrophic coverage is that you will pay for the preventative/routine/minor stuff out of pocket.
Found this on substack:
”Exclusive: Luigi’s Manifesto Read the manifesto the media refused to publish Ken Klippenstein Dec 10, 2024”
I’ve obtained a copy of suspected killer Luigi Mangione’s manifesto — the real one, not the forgery circulating online. Major media outlets are also in possession of the document but have refused to publish it and not even articulated a reason why. My queries to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and NBC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered.
I’ll have more to say on this later — on how unhealthy the media’s drift away from public disclosure is — but for now, here’s the manifesto:
“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
People won’t do it then. There’s a reason insurers usually cover 100% the annual physicals. Especially on HDHPs, people would skip the physicals because it’s 100% costs to them and someone else (insurer) ends up paying when it devolves into catastrophic care.
I think it’d be more cost-effective for society to have federal annual free physicals for all (not universal healthcare, just a limited list of tests you could do for free as part of a physical) to boost early detection of conditions and save money down the line.
But I totally agree on middlemen and overhead from paperwork. Both for healthcare and dental care. I’d add the rampant conflict of interests of the financial relationships that drug and medical device companies have with healthcare providers.
The way I see it, ultimately there’s no way to have your cake (great healthcare) and eat it too (low premiums). I don’t think there’s an ideal balance of premiums vs deductible. When people are younger, they’d probably favor a low premium low usage HDHP. And then as they get older, suddenly the $25k deductible that they hit almost every year gets less palatable. Basically, when younger, you don’t want to subsidize older people’s healthcare until you’re one of these older people and then you don’t want anyone to touch your Medicare (because others are subsidizing it).
All that doesn’t excuse the insurance industry merry-go-round of delay deny defend. When you sign up for health insurance, it should be clear cut what’s covered and what isn’t. In practice, it’s nothing like a solid contract. Instead they built a byzantine bureaucracy of obstacles in the claims processing, get their own paid doctors to override other doctor recommendations, and exploit every possible loophole to breach their own contracts with customers.
It’s like if you contracted a plumber to fix a leaky pipe, you paid them to fix the issue, and they did nothing telling you that the bucket you put underneath the pipe to catch the dripping water is good enough so fixing the pipe is unnecessary. Oh and every plumber in town did the same.
No wonder that sympathy for someone killed after getting rich on the back of millions of defrauded customers, is in fairly short supply. Kinda like when Madoff died in prison. The only surprising thing is that this type of backlash did not come sooner and/or more frequently.
Good background article on the evolution of our health system.
With progressives cheering on, the political class used government intervention to create a healthcare system that behaves as if its sole purpose is to move as much money as possible into the pockets of healthcare providers, drug companies, hospitals, health-related federal agencies, and insurance providers.
But the party could not last forever. As the price of healthcare rose, the price of health insurance rose, too. Eventually, when insurance premiums grew too high, fewer employers or individual buyers were willing to buy insurance, and the flow of money into the healthcare system started to falter.
The data suggests that that tipping point was reached in the early 2000s. For the first time since the cycle began back in the 1960s, the number of people with health insurance began to fall each year. Healthcare providers—who had seemingly assumed that the flow of money would never stop increasing—began to panic.
Then came Barack Obama.
Obama’s seminal legislative accomplishment—the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare—can best be understood as a ploy by healthcare providers and the government to keep the party going.
You might want to update your post to mention that this is most likely a fake. It’s a good one, wonder why anybody would go through the trouble.