How The Insurance Industry Destroyed Healthcare
The growing healthcare costs due to useless Insurance
A lot of people won’t tell you this but if you’ve bought an Insurance or even thinking of buying Insurance, the Insurance industry is one of the biggest scams in the world.
While the industry relies on reducing minimum downside and making money of your premiums, their entire objective is to never actually pay for the things they are insuring.
When dealing with Insurance, it is very important to read the fine print before purchase because when filling for a claim you can easily be duped by Insurer by Claiming that XYZ is not covered or doesn’t fit their provided terms & conditions.
The Insurance company knows that even when a consumer goes to court for a claim, nothing much is going to happen. They being a multi-billion dollar industry, they already have access to world’s best lawyers and have money well above what an average person can shell out for a claim.
The rising cost of Hospital Bills
The rise of Insurance companies should be studied alongside the rise of Hospitals bills. I feel the two are not independent, they are actually more related than you think. If you think that Hospital bills have increased on their own or due to inflation, you should think again.
The Insurance companies provide an incentive for Hospitals to keep a patient inside longer than required, perform procedures which were not needed and charge money for things which could have been avoided. If you think about this, you are more than likely to be wasting your time and money in Hospitals because they don’t really care about you.
If you have ever been to a Private hospital, the one thing that is really lacking there is “Trust” on both sides. The doctors hold onto your reports till you pay your bills while the patient is worried that the doctors will perform unnecessary tests to increase their bill.
Most People can’t afford a trip to the Hospital
It is stupid already that Hospitals charge you years of Savings for a simple procedure or a few tests. Private hospitals including those who are run by “Trusts” are the worst of the lot, first they take you in — perform a few tests and tell you to pay for each and everything ranging from beds, lights, rooms, fans, and registration! Each minute, hour, and day spent at the hospital hits your wallet.
It’s easy for some of you to say that Private Hospitals are not running a charity and that Doctors need to earn money too! But to them I would say how much is too much? How will a laborer or poor person afford to pay for such extravagant treatments and costs!
When the healthcare industry talks about helping the poor & needy and savings lives, always take that with a grain of salt because they never say that the treatment is for EVERYONE because well that is for the government to subsidize, why should we care about it!
Healthcare today is mostly for the ones who can AFFORD IT. Those who can’t don’t make them money anyways!
The strange thing about insurance is that it never covers things that you would usually need it for like an OPD, cost of medicines, tests, etc. Big Healthcare expenditures are covered which provide incentives to Hospitals to do Hospitalization even in minor cases.
Why I feel things like Healthcare and Education should FREE and be provided by Government
For a taxpayer a common expectation is that they should be provided with basic necessities to lead a good life. You give all this money as tax to the government and expect them to do better in areas like Healthcare, Infrastructure and Education.
But Government has their own agendas on their mind, useless expenditure on New Parliaments, building Tall Statues of Dead People (who when Alive would have hated the idea to have a statue of their own), heavy expenditure on renaming Cities and money spent on countless Marketing campaigns of useless initiatives that no one remembers after 5 years of launching!
The vicious cycle in India is that while the common man expects the Government to do better, the Government turns to the Private sector to solve their Problems.
If everything should be solved by the Private sector why do we need a Democratically elected Government, if so companies should run the Government? — No wonder why most policies favor Private companies rather than the common man.
Countries like Finland and UK have been able to achieve fully state funded Education and Healthcare respectively, meaning everyone has the right to gain access to Free Education & Healthcare.
Why can’t we as a nation do this? Why do we still depend on the private sector so much, why does India have trade deficit even when it is not spending that much on Education and Healthcare!
I believe the answer lies in Intentions and Incentives, when you build systems that reward the ones that cheat — You’ll have cheaters at the top, Similarly If you want to Win Elections, you want to stay afar from the real issues and expose yourself.
Here’s the truth about Politics — “It is the Rich people who don’t want the Poor to know that they’re the ones who are looting the system.”
Instead, they make the poor fight amongst themselves over petty issues like caste, religion, gender, race, etc. The lust for power is great and you can see it in those who are at the top.
Rich people control the media and everything that you see, hear and feel. They’re the ones who are making enormous donations to those who favor them and inevitably making them win.
Conclusion
It is a complex social problem but something that should be solved with all of our Vigor and effort. If we could achieve state funded Healthcare and Education that’ll be game-changing in this country. People are getting ripped off their savings because they have to rely on Private companies to take care of their health and education (School / College / Tuition).
It is high time for India to understand this, things will get worse from here if not acted in time. India is home to 1.4 Billion people who will suffer because of bad policies and implementation. A lot of things need to be improved in this country before we can call it a super power.
Good economic policies with effective management of Tax-payers’ money can go a long way in making life better for people in this country.
