Although obamacare supporters have made much of their case on demonizing "big fat" health insurance companies and their outrageous profits, the truth is actually something entirely different:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200...eck_health_insurance

The most important reform regarding healthcare should begin with tort reform. Trial attorneys are scoring 14% profit margins.

Mmmm, extra fat.

http://hotair.com/archives/200...lion-to-the-deficit/

(misspelled word in title)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: HayateAce,

Well, that settles it! Clearly the US healthcare system isn't completely backwards and the laughing stock of the western world.

I sure hope nothing is done about it!

Maybe they'd have higher profits if they didn't pay their CEO's so much...

http://www.fiercehealthcare.co...pensation/2009-05-14

or spend so much money lobbying...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl...ma-healthcare-reform



Fortunately for these poor insurance companies they are going to save a ton of money by denying coverage to kids who are too fat...

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_13530098

or too thin...

http://www.thedenverchannel.co...21343449/detail.html

*shrug*

U.S. health care system wastes up to $800B a year

admittedly, more and more i find the daily new breakfast threads by hayateace a fountain of well sorted and to the point.
and informative.

but it is not easy for such east-of-ponders like me to comprehend the true debates which goes on at the-other-side-of-pond. the things we get to hear sound so different. i guess it is some kind of language evolution.
anyway, i have already learned, that liberal means socialist and partisanship describes an indoctrinated fanclub. and today, i start to understand, that healthcare is not only about providing care, but also club competiting for the forbes-cup.
that is fat news!
and hayateace is very right, i wouldn't give them a chance in the fight against the public transport or the communication. isn't communication the winner since decades?
or trial attorneys... that is a classy club! they are even better than the wind-energy guys over here - they had only 11 percent this year.

no way, healthcare can make it, not with players like health insurers, those losers. i heard, that kaiser permanente had to write off 800 mio in a past season, because they didn't get their own computersystem together. and then had to spend another 6000 mio for another deal? i bet, this is still some percent profit less even now.

i mean, they made only 2 percent? that is in dollars, isn't it? ridiculous... if it were at least in pounds or euros! 2 percent dollars is hardly enough profit for some men to survive the next year.

i heard, there is a rumour about a reform of the old strategies? keep us updated, pls. i want to know how it works out. hopefully, that wacky healthinsurers can defeat their positions... all is better than to bring new players in! if nothing changes and the ticket-prises will be steady rising, i have good hopes for some more forbes-points then!


edit:
i suffered reply-window rivalry and mistakingly mentioned 'horseback' instead of 'hayateace'.
once established, the error continued (since i often write in notepad')... i corrected it now.
my deepest apology to both!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: deepo_HP,

"Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans."

Lawdy miss claudy, however will they be able to pay the company CEOs with only a paltry 2 percent profit?

It seems that the industry is caught in a trap where the solution seems to be is to increase the price for the remaining customer's premiums to compensate for those who dropped their policies because they may have become too expensive.

What I would like to know is if this 2 percent profit statement is true, then why are these insurance companies fighting as hard as they are to prevent a government health reform plan? Are they making up their profit margin with their other types of insurance plans such as life, homeowner's, etc. to offset the languid performance of the health insurance departments? Something doesn't seem quite right here, and perhaps they could be monkeying around with the books to maybe make it seem like they are not doing as well as they really are?

quote:

Originally posted by Messaschnitzel:
Lawdy miss claudy, however will they be able to pay the company CEOs with only a paltry 2 percent profit?

let aside hayateace's jokes about percents... after all it is still profit:
by the example of 'kaiser permanente' - 2006 the group had a revenue of 34 bio dollar with 'just' 8 mio members.
the net income in 2006 was 1.3 bio dollar (for hayateace: a net-margin of 4 %, and 30% more profit than the year before ).

will be a hard time with only 2 % this year (assuming they are average).
but then again, the costs increase, so does the revenue. i would guess, the profit is still in the range as before.


you ask, what a ceo get paid?
by the example of 'healthspring' - the company's profit was 112 mio (a 5% margin) and they pay 2.5 mio for the ceo.

(is that too much?
in the automobile-industry, the former jewel of the free market in the us, a ceo gets at 'ford' the yearly sum of 5.1 mio dollars. but he is family, so probably modest in the demands)


franly spoken, i find the ceos in the examples wastely if not absurdly overpaid. in that regard i fully agree with horseback.

i have no clue though, how he relates the forbes-percentage and the blown-up managements to the announced reform. hayateace mentions 'obamacare' - the point of critic should here probably be the lack of intention to 'cure' care-prociders margins in the reform? or maybe i am awfully wrong, and hayateace means that there are measurements planned to raise the profits of the suffering providers, but not to effectively restructure the management under governmental direction?

however, just reading that the net-profit for the biggest healthcare-provider ('kaiser') is ~1.5 bio, and considering that 'kaiser' takes care of only 3% of the market, i would say that the profit is fantastic in these times of depression, the costs of healthcare in the usa far above anywhere else in the universe and the actual healthcare-system just absurd.


so, my deepest sorrows for the poor profit margin of providers. maybe they have bad management, maybe the market is saturated. surely there is no reason to conclude by low margins, that the overall profit is not much too high. and surely this thread has nothing to do with the urgent need of reforming that creepy system of healthcare in the states.

but then again... it's not my business at all.

oh, one thing - the highest profit margin, as quoted by hayateace, has 'yum brands'.
(it seems, that despite the highest rate of fatty people worldwide, that market still grows )

edit:
corrected a name, whom i adresses to (pls read my edit in the last post).
again, i am very sorry.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: deepo_HP,

The point is, and every one of you has missed it, problems with the system have been squarely laid upon the health insurer's as an easy scapegoat.

Follow the lies up the chain to the whitehouse and find the actual problems.

"Profit is a dirty word only to the leeches of the world. They want it seen as evil, so they can more easily snatch what they did not earn."

quote:

Originally posted by DrHerb:
*shrug*

U.S. health care system wastes up to $800B a year

An interesting quote from the source provided...

quote:

Unnecessary care such as the overuse of antibiotics and lab tests to protect against malpractice exposure makes up 37 percent of health care waste...

So tort reform, right off the bat, would reduce health care waste by 37% JUST IN ANTIBIOTICS AND LAB TESTS ALONE. Assuming a $675 billion waste (middle of the estimated range) that's 250 billion.

quote:

Fraud makes up 22 percent of health care waste, or up to $200 billion a year in fraudulent Medicare claims, kickbacks for referrals for unnecessary services and other scams.

So aggressive prosecution and viciously harsh prison sentences could cut nearly 22% from Medicare.



I wonder if any of the proposed alternatives do anything meaningful to combat the above wastes?


--Outlaw.

It is worth keeping in mind that the present US healthcare system, so energetically and virulently criticized by the Obama administration and media fan club, is basically a product of massive federally subsidized healthcare programs passed during the "Great Society" period and successively extended and expanded until it has achieved gargantuan proportions. Why should we believe that government can today do a better job administering an even more massive and complicated system, based upon what we have witnessed of their previous management efforts?

In my opinion, this entire campaign is at its fundamental root not about "reforming" healthcare. It is really about government seizing financial control of an industry that accounts for 1 out of every 6 or 7 dollars spent in the United States today - a figure projected by some to reach 1 in 3 within a few decades. That represents BIG MONEY and does theoretically explain the immense effort being so single-mindedly devoted to push this through Congress when so many other more urgently pressing problems beset the country - economy teetering on brink of depression, rampant job contraction in the private sector and rapidly rising unemployment, and the persisting financial and investing regulatory crisis which even today remains ignored.

It might be trite, but it remains nevertheless true: Follow the Money.

Rabble rabble socialism rabble rabble government takeover rabble rabble tort reform!!!

quote:

Originally posted by Blutarski2004:
It is worth keeping in mind that the present US healthcare system, so energetically and virulently criticized by the Obama administration and media fan club, is basically a product of massive federally subsidized healthcare programs passed during the "Great Society" period and successively extended and expanded until it has achieved gargantuan proportions. Why should we believe that government can today do a better job administering an even more massive and complicated system, based upon what we have witnessed of their previous management efforts?

In my opinion, this entire campaign is at its fundamental root not about "reforming" healthcare. It is really about government seizing financial control of an industry that accounts for 1 out of every 6 or 7 dollars spent in the United States today - a figure projected by some to reach 1 in 3 within a few decades. That represents BIG MONEY and does theoretically explain the immense effort being so single-mindedly devoted to push this through Congress when so many other more urgently pressing problems beset the country - economy teetering on brink of depression, rampant job contraction in the private sector and rapidly rising unemployment, and the persisting financial and investing regulatory crisis which even today remains ignored.

It might be trite, but it remains nevertheless true: Follow the Money.

Sounds like a darned good case for socialism, Blutarski. 'government seizing financial control of an industry that accounts for 1 out of every 6 or 7 dollars spent in the United States today' - since the present system doesn't deliver healthcare at all to a significant section of US citizens, the insurance companies can't run it at a profit and the only people who seem to make any money out of it are the lawyers, abandoning any ideas of a mixed system and nationalising the lot might be the simplest solution. Come to think of it, you could do the same to the banks too...

In my opinion health care should be treated like police, fire and basic education... and in many areas sanitiation. It serves the common good to have these things and when you take something as basic as health care and render it as a solely for profit endeavor then you only promote some of the very things we see happening now.

The politicizing of health care reform does a disservice to the nation IMO. I have a job.. I have health care.. but I know people who have lost their jobs.. or used COBRA and had to drop it because they just couldn't afford it. I wonder how many people now opposed to health care reform would feel the same way if they were the ones who did not have it.

People have no humility that's why.