Insurance Industry Should Not Have Entered the Healthcare Arena in the First Place

If we are capitalists, then we should have behaved like capitalists. Not break capitalistic rules just for the sake of diversification into places where no profits exist.

The survival of insurance is based on insuring against unexpected ends and outcomes - e.g., shipwreck, air crashes, natural calamities - those which usually are not expected to happen under normal circumstances.

It is the rarity of such occurrences that makes insurance industry profitable considering the fact that they usually cannot invest their excess funds in risky ventures.

Rare outcomes mean premiums cover not only the payments and expenses but build up reserves for the company.

The second avenue of incomes are those from expected but not immediate occurrences like normal deaths.

But DISEASES are a different story - they are neither rare nor remote, they happen daily. Insurance companies cannot make any profit from such conditions as premiums collected will never cover up the payments and expenses, though that fact may have been covered up in the initial euphoria like that happens in a ponzi scheme.
And forget about building reserves.

Where is the profit in robbing Paul just to pay Peter? That too, when it happens daily?

Whoever saw healthcare as a new revenue source for the insurance industry would have been lauded as a genius when it was originally proposed.

That was like a drunkard driving into a blind alley ignoring the signs and then trying to bulldoze through somebody else's driveway, backyard and fence. Pure mess.

So half a century later that genius stands exposed and is suspect.

Healthcare existed even before health insurance. It knew how to adjust itself to the needs and affordability of its consumers without outside help.

But when the new breed of managers hit the road with their new found wisdom from management schools, they started spreading their one-shot corporate panacea for all industrial ills.

That meant they changed all industries to suit them, rather than changing their skills to suit the concerned industries.

No wonder, some non-health professionals set their greedy eyes on healthcare and saw it as their milch cow.

For them patients were no better than cars to be insured and houses to be mortgaged.

And to please such people, hospitals and clinicians bent over their backs to change their workplaces from patient healthcare to administrative healthcare.

Soon Americans saw their heart attack patients being mercilessly kicked out on the third day, surgical patients with raw unhealed wounds being unceremoniously eased out to enrich insurance CEOs. That too, even after paying premiums through the nose.

Don't tell me anybody considers hospitals as spas and resorts and likes to live there endlessly.

Ensnaring employers with bulk group insurance schemes meant another treachery with the American patient further shortchanged as far as clinical care was concerned.

Healthcare equipment and pharmaceutical manufacturing is another group that is fleecing the American patient.

As part of a tour group, I was in a foreign country, when our bus met with an accident. Being foreigners there, we were given special attention at the hospital, in case our embassy needed to be informed. As I was being scanned, my eyes fell on the "Made in USA" label on the scanner and felt proud. But when I asked the price they paid for that American scanner machine, it was a different story.

After coming back I found that the same machine is being sold here at astronomical prices while at a steep discount abroad. So basically Americans are being squeezed by manufacturers in the initial years of sales of their products to cover up their R&D expenses by charging very high prices. And no wonder, insurance industry, already in a place where they should not be according their own science, do not want to cover those expenses.
Cheap medicines from beyond the border also is the same story.

Healthcare industry cannot go on bearing the administrative work imposed on by the insurance companies which don't pay them properly.

Good that the nation has finally come face to face with this problem. Otherwise hospitals would have no choice but to create ludicrous jobs like

Vice President, Quality Control for Syringes

Vice President, Quality Control for Needles

Vice President, Quality Control for Swabs and what not.
Everything except real healthcare. For writing bills that may or may not be paid.

How can an industry run on half-paid bills - what kind of management principle is that? That was a clear-cut case of not practicing what we preach. Who said sending collection notices will pay up unpaid bills?

So, we want our clinicians to run after another mirage - getting money out of patients, that was originally promised by the insurance guys.

Then, what is the validity of the oft-repeated hoopla - the sanctity of the signed contract?

None of this would have happened if healthcare and its customers were left to find their own acceptable solutions. Now the only result of such ill-conceived interference are jacked up bills, to avoid being not fully paid as promised.

Am I supporting Republican healthcare or Democratic healthcare or Obamacare? None of them.

But I do want the insurance industry to gradually get out of healthcare. Daily diseases cannot provide adequate income for their industry, though deaths can. Thus healthcare industry can breathe by itself and find its own moorings among its own customers. That was how things were being done before the new bewildering array of management fads caught on. HMO, PPO and all that jazz.

Non-healthcare industries cannot go on enslaving hospitals and clinics to make money out of them by charging exorbitant prices or interposing themselves between clinicians and patients. And all this jack-the-price-up drama takes place for bills that are never fully paid!

Non-health CEOs should find diversification elsewhere for their industrial sectors and leave healthcare and its customers alone.

Then there won't be any need for Republican-care, Democratic-care or Obama-care.

Healthcare is about humans, not humanoids or machines. No Wall Street tricks will work there or needed there. No need for middlemen either.