Stoller writes well in describing how we got here. Companies like UHG are not just a pure "health insurer" anymore, just like Alphabet isn't just a search engine. It's a chunky article, so put the page in reader mode to get your phone to read it aloud or something. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-break-up-big-medicine UnitedHealth Group is not an insurer, it's a platform. And it's in the crosshairs as Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley propose breaking it apart, severing its pharmacy arm from the rest of the business The saga of the UnitedHealth Care CEO assassination has, as could be expected, now turned into a discussion of our health care system. Elizabeth Warren, for instance, is making the obvious point that people hate the health care system. Then, productively, she proposed, along with Republican Senator Josh Hawley, legislation to split apart some of these monster companies from their pharmacy subsidiaries, thus reducing conflicts of interest in health care. While this legislation was in the works long before the killing, it didn’t stop Wall Street investors from saying that any discussion of health care reform was a de facto endorsement of murder.
add "some" in front of Wall Street investors. it is analogous to some false narratives / intellectual dishonesty about Fed's monetary policies / fine-turning. while Powell's Fed was raising the discount rate to counter inflation pressures--in the process lowering it from ~9% to the 3% range---false narratives that it was wrecking its balance sheet were being spinned.
Socialize pre-existing conditions, including child birth. Let the markets do the rest. It isn't THAT hard (for idiots who supported the ACA)
Liberals always thought of the ACA as THE solution. Leftists always knew it was a finger cut band aid applied to a severed femoral artery.
Nah Libs wanted Single Payer and was suckered by Obama and Pelosi to swallow the "most realistic deal." To make it go down smoother, there were fluffy op/eds from left leaning think tanks about experimental panels that would make it "more efficient" or some BS that never panned out or was made feasible. Typical high fallutin Ideas Factory Drivel to Nowhere that populates a lot of left ideas right now... No one was really happy with Obamacare, and now we have these god awful monopolies that do less than what were promised in its wake.
All you are doing is telling folks you don’t understand how Congress works….. There was never a congressional majority for any form of universal healthcare. Guess which party kneecapped ACA and didn’t fund the high risk pools? Guess which party constantly weakened ACA? GOP does the same thing with public education…. Underfund and intentionally make it worse so they can say “see we told you”. Take a look around…. It hasn’t just been healthcare companies becoming larger and stronger.
ACA was a failure from the start because it still depends on the existence of private insurance networks which I haven't heard an explanation of why they should exist? Why does the middle man pooling money together need a profit motive? What innovations are private insurers providing to society because they are profit motivated? Why can't a team of actuary scientists and medical scientists on government 200k a year salaries run this collective pool of money?
Yawn. That’s an entirely separate issue. There has never been a congressional majority to enact universal healthcare.
A starting point to what? Until the most prominent Democrat politicians leading the DNC aren't getting donations and support from private insurers, any rhetoric about a eventual single payer system is just that... rhetoric. Today, ask Democrat leaders, and they will tell you fully restoring ACA is the ultimate solution, not single payer. The Democrat party has moved to the right on this over the past 8 years. It's now shifted to the idealized version of the ACA as being the ultimate solution,
Exactly. The ACA hinges on a private insurance industry existing. Hence a band aid on a severed artery.
Obvy Dem leaders don't know how Congress works! Anyhow, the system is broke and broken. It's unfortunate it took an assassination of a CEO excelling at what the current system has intended. Good luck to Warren and Hawley on passing a bill to curtail the biggest gaps.
Obviously any sort of healthcare reform? You do understand a piece of ACA (which was rules and regulations) was increasing PUBLIC healthcare such as CHIP and Medicaid for low income and working class?
The vertical integration of these companies is definitely a problem. It is a very monopolistic industry in general, and the integration has made that worse. People have few options for health insurance due to employer coverage and the way the exchange works. Then you take what is available and they control the pharmacies and often the doctors. It is just gross.
What did your response of "suckered by Obama and Pelosi to swallow the "most realistic deal." have to do with the article? Matt Stoller doesn't seem to understand "healthcare rationing" is a part of all healthcare, even the vaunted Universal Health. Systems wouldn't function too well if every person with hyperlipidemia was given the best cholesterol medications. Matt Stoller's article about how ACA (he prefers the term Obamacare) Created Big Medicine: Like bro.... that's how universal healthcare works with the main difference being private vs public. You want big network(s) with a bunch of contracted providers. What US healthcare needs is a public backbone (just expand Medicare) with private supplemental.
That's the feature/bug of capitalism. Public healthcare "works" because it is very monopolistic, the difference is the public is funding it instead of having a profit motive. Universal healthcare has to consider sustainability so it employs a lot of the same principles (provider networks, formularies, etc).
Elon Musk took to X to question why Americans aren't “getting their money's worth” despite the United States leading the world in health care administrative costs, Mark Cuban gave Musk a crash course on how their decisions directly impact health care costs and quality in the U.S. Let’s start with the pharmacy side. I haven’t seen your contracts, but I already know that if you have a contract with a big PBM you: 1. Don’t control your claims data 2. Don’t control your formulary 3. Have to pay more for “Specialty Drugs” that have nothing special about them 4. Get rebates that are paid for by your sickest and oldest employees and result in higher deductibles and co-pays that impact the wellness of your workers and their families. 5. Cause independent pharmacies to be reimbursed for less than their costs for brand drug scripts for your employees and families. Causing them to go out of business 6. Can’t talk to manufacturers to put together wellness programs for things like GLP1s 7. Signed a PBM contract with an NDA which prevents you from publicly discussing your PBM contract , resulting in an opaque, inefficient market, which leads to higher prices and lower quality of care for the entire country All of this allows the big PBMs to continue to distort the pharmacy market for literally EVERYONE If DOGE extends its mandate to educating CEOs, about how to Direct Contract with providers and how to work with Pass Through PBMs, then you can change the balance of power in healthcare and change how healthcare in this country works
