Health Insurers Gave $120 Billion To Shareholders While Denying Your Claim
Health Insurers Gave $120 Billion To Shareholders While Denying Your Claim
The country’s largest insurers spent $120 billion on stock buybacks since 2010, with nearly half of that spent by UnitedHealth.
Well yeah, that's how they got the 120 billion. This is the system working completely as intended. "It's not a bug. It's a feature."
That's the health funds working to gain full control of their cash cow. They don't want to share the profits of future kills with investors so they're buying them out
Since 2010, they’ve raked in a combined $9 trillion in revenue, netting more than $371 billion in profits
When they phrase it that way the insurance companies actually look better than they're commonly marked for. If I'm putting the right number of 0s in a calculator that's a profit rate of 4.12% which is a heck of a lot less than places like the retailers where they can afford to have a half off sale.
What we could really use is breakout of the 'above bottom line' expenditures to see who takes what from each $ put in.
The metric you need is what percent of revenue was used to pay doctors and hostpitals vs how much was wasted on “buisiness expenses”
Profit is just the leftovers that they couldnt figure out how to spend before tax time
Profit is what remains after paying your executives large sums of money.
Profit is a useless measure in most respects. The money they spend on executive compensation and stock buybacks isn’t part of the profits. The money they funnel to their fake charities and non profits isn’t part of the profits. The money they give to politicians and high priced consultant friends is not part of the profits. Profit is really just what’s left over after quite of few people have already profited quite a bit.
It also shows how convoluted and busy work the system is, how many utterly pointless jobs involved.
Retail stores don't kill people by raising the price of some shirt...
Parasites
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Buy shares in health insurer
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Get claim denied
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Sell shares
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Pay medical bills and watch the share price drop for added schadenfreude
Step 0. Have enough money to buy enough shares to pay your medical bills? 😬
Step -1) dad with emerald mine
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In America, ostensibly the richest nation in the world, we ration healthcare whilst the right wing politicians jeer about Canada’s system as a slippery slope to “death panels” denying care. Whilst UHC and the gang do the same thing, and that’s ‘controlling cost’ or ‘delivering efficiency’.
Distribution on a timescale is about capacity - if it’s slow for you to receive a service, that’s likely because there isn’t capacity. That capacity may have never existed because a bean counter deemed it more profitable to not hire nurses/buy dialysis machines/build a new hospital wing/etc. and have a backlog of cases.
Or that capacity exists, but is sequestered and reserved for those who pay even more; personal doctors, private clinics, or specialists who are kept idle on contract for demand surges.
crazy how making health care a for profit industry has led to what some would call "death panels"