It’s self fulfilling though. Doctors offices are at the whims of their agreements with the insurance companies to stay afloat. They pad the bill (charging maximum for everything) because the insurance company will only pay percentages on most procedures. Then they usually write off the rest (or close to it). Doctors are incentivized to prescribe certain drugs over others, and other such meddling.
Healthcare costs are as high as they are specifically because of private insurance. The evidence is in every single other developed country that has state-provided healthcare. It’s overall cheaper, and often better.
Insurance companies default to denying claims because they know, if the barrier is high enough (denial after denial), people will simply stop asking for the procedure (or whatever), so they don’t have to pay anything. Then their earnings go up, and they pad their pockets.
I don’t disagree with you. We can’t simply replace insurance companies with a public version and expect everything to be okay. But Medicare and Medicaid seem to work really well for a lot of people. They can simply expand it, and then private insurance can still exist as a supplement if someone wants.
But what we really need is more regulation, everywhere, on almost all industries.
Gotta kill citizens United, and make superpacs illegal. When money gets out of politics, is when we’ll finally see some change.