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The week's question
In March 2025, in the thread "Re: OT, out", Umm asked the members: "Do you think it is because America is made up of magical soil that makes businesses based in America magically profitable?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Personal Finance / Macroeconomic Trends & Risks
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Author: PucksFool ✧✺  😊 😞
Number: of 4582 
Subject: For profit health insurance ...
Date: 12/16/24 4:39 PM
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No. of Recommendations: 7
... is death assurance.

motherjones.com - Toll health insurance industry profits claim denials delays care brian thompson unitedhealth luigi mangione ph
Amid the frenzied coverage of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson‘s assassination and the public’s troubling reaction to it were references to various polls, including one conducted in 2016 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, whose results suggested that Americans were content with their private health plans.

Similar stats had crept into the debate over Medicare for All—a proposed national health insurance program to cover all Americans, and with which private insurers would have to compete. A few weeks before Thompson was murdered, AHIP, the primary trade group for commercial health insurers, published a new survey it had commissioned. About three-quarters of respondents, a “strong majority,” the group said, were satisfied with their employer-provided plans and preferred getting their coverage this way, as opposed to through any government program.

I found these numbers hard to square with the nonchalant—even celebratory—response to Thompson’s death. Until, that is, I spoke with Ed Weisbart. A veteran medical doctor, now retired, Weisbart serves as national board secretary for Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), a nonpartisan organization of some 25,000 doctors founded in 1987 to advocate for a public health insurance program. (Disclosure: My late mother was a member.)

So long as you’re healthy, he told me, it is in your insurer’s best interest to keep you happy by delivering on small claims. It’s only when it looks as though you’re going to cost them lots of money that the denials start coming—and maybe by then you’re too sick to fight. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Scroll down in the link and look at the graph. Something happened after 2016.
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