They only have numbers up to 2023 and I don’t want to have to go back and change my numbers. This is time consuming and I want to go do something else. :)
I can’t imagine operating costs rose by 340%. Someone else can finish the numbers, but my conclusion is: the situation is fucked up.
Edit: back in the morning to say, even if we said operating costs were $999 million (To keep my earlier statement accurate)(I don’t feel like finding the numbers again) and they rose 340% in the last year to 3B, that’s still $165.9 billion dollars that should be spent on health care that they’re pocketing.
I appreciate you fact checking on this front; I’m a Brit who’s extremely in favour of universal healthcare, but I feel uneasy seeing international discourse about how comparatively cheap universal healthcare is when our National Health Service (NHS) seems to be performing worse than ever — both in cost and in helping people.
My view is that the NHS is its knees because even a single-payer healthcare system isn’t enough to outrun market-based neoliberal economics, and that’s bad news for anyone who ever needs healthcare. It must seem like utopia to Americans who are suffering sorely under the insurance companies’ heel, but we’ve got a lot of pushing ahead of us.
You had 15 years of the Tories deliberately trying to run the NHS into the ground so they could announce it doesn’t work and then create a US-style for-profit healthcare system that their cronies could profit from
My view is that the NHS is its knees because even a single-payer healthcare system isn’t enough to outrun market-based neoliberal economics
Certainly the Tories did far more harm to the NHS than Labour would’ve if they had been in charge for the same period. However, if we consider how, under Tony Blair, did plenty to hasten the privatisation of the NHS in the 00s, this is, to some degree, a “bipartisan” issue. (Thatcher did say that New Labour was her greatest achievement)
I think that as long as neoliberalism is the backdrop of economic truth that politicians are working on, we’re going to see this kind of erosion of the public good, like the NHS.
I hear ya. As a Canadian I’m well aware of the problems with our “universal” health care, but at least no one here goes in to life-altering debt because they broke their arm.
The US health system’s cost is not it’s only problem, I’m just comparing costs right now.
It also costs like 100k to have a baby if everything goes right. And god forbid that baby needs any sort of medical care, the insurance company can just say “sorry, your baby isn’t insured” and make you wait to get them ‘onboarded’ to the insurance plan.
That’s what happened to me and thankfully the pediatrician came into the hospital room as I was on the phone evidently in distress with the insurance company, hours after my son was born. My son needed a few test and some minor things, nothing too serious but life threatening if ignored. It would have put us out of our house since insurance wouldn’t cover it. The doctor argued with the hospital for a while to waive the bills for his care and when they wouldn’t he gave me an address and a name and told me to get there ASAP and they’ll take care of him. It turns out this guy had a whole network of people who were fed up enough that they started a sort of pro bono pediatric system. It felt like some shady back alley medical care at first having to leave my wife in the hospital to take my newborn son to get simple life saving care. Never charged us a penny and one of the guys actually pulled some string to get my sons insurance activated 3 days after he was born instead of the month we were told. We’re still paying off his bills from the hospital 3 years later for those first few hours.
I enthusiastically agree, but I would also qualify that Blair’s New Labour did their fair share of accelerating privatisation of the NHS too — it’s why I point the finger primarily at neoliberalism
My view is that the NHS is its knees because even a single-payer healthcare system isn’t enough to outrun market-based neoliberal economics
*looks at decades of successful single-payer system in my country*
My view is that the NHS is its knees because systemic dysfunction isn’t enough to outrun market-based neoliberal economics. Although systemic dysfunction and neoliberal are synonyms.
That’s $1575USD for each Canadian at the rounded number of 40mil, or $2258CAD.
In 2022 we spent $8563CAD per Canadian, according to the first source I found. (https://www.cihi.ca/en/national-health-expenditure-trends-2022-snapshot)
Just crunching some numbers 🤷♂️
Edit: continuing crunching:
For their 56m customers, that’s $479.5B CAD, or $334.3B USD if they were to spend the same amount as Canada did in 2022.
Now to find out how much they’re profiting yearly compared to how much they’re spending to find out how (roughly) how much you’re being ripped off…
Edit: computing…
Wow. Apparently they increased profit by $340% from 2023 to $168.9 in 2024. (https://m.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-group/gross-profit)
According to this source, operating costs are only in the hundreds of millions.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/622295/operating-costs-of-unitedhealth-group-by-type/
They only have numbers up to 2023 and I don’t want to have to go back and change my numbers. This is time consuming and I want to go do something else. :)
I can’t imagine operating costs rose by 340%. Someone else can finish the numbers, but my conclusion is: the situation is fucked up.
Edit: back in the morning to say, even if we said operating costs were $999 million (To keep my earlier statement accurate)(I don’t feel like finding the numbers again) and they rose 340% in the last year to 3B, that’s still $165.9 billion dollars that should be spent on health care that they’re pocketing.
I appreciate you fact checking on this front; I’m a Brit who’s extremely in favour of universal healthcare, but I feel uneasy seeing international discourse about how comparatively cheap universal healthcare is when our National Health Service (NHS) seems to be performing worse than ever — both in cost and in helping people.
My view is that the NHS is its knees because even a single-payer healthcare system isn’t enough to outrun market-based neoliberal economics, and that’s bad news for anyone who ever needs healthcare. It must seem like utopia to Americans who are suffering sorely under the insurance companies’ heel, but we’ve got a lot of pushing ahead of us.
You had 15 years of the Tories deliberately trying to run the NHS into the ground so they could announce it doesn’t work and then create a US-style for-profit healthcare system that their cronies could profit from
Is exactly what they were pushing to justify this
Certainly the Tories did far more harm to the NHS than Labour would’ve if they had been in charge for the same period. However, if we consider how, under Tony Blair, did plenty to hasten the privatisation of the NHS in the 00s, this is, to some degree, a “bipartisan” issue. (Thatcher did say that New Labour was her greatest achievement)
I think that as long as neoliberalism is the backdrop of economic truth that politicians are working on, we’re going to see this kind of erosion of the public good, like the NHS.
I hear ya. As a Canadian I’m well aware of the problems with our “universal” health care, but at least no one here goes in to life-altering debt because they broke their arm.
The US health system’s cost is not it’s only problem, I’m just comparing costs right now.
It also costs like 100k to have a baby if everything goes right. And god forbid that baby needs any sort of medical care, the insurance company can just say “sorry, your baby isn’t insured” and make you wait to get them ‘onboarded’ to the insurance plan.
That’s what happened to me and thankfully the pediatrician came into the hospital room as I was on the phone evidently in distress with the insurance company, hours after my son was born. My son needed a few test and some minor things, nothing too serious but life threatening if ignored. It would have put us out of our house since insurance wouldn’t cover it. The doctor argued with the hospital for a while to waive the bills for his care and when they wouldn’t he gave me an address and a name and told me to get there ASAP and they’ll take care of him. It turns out this guy had a whole network of people who were fed up enough that they started a sort of pro bono pediatric system. It felt like some shady back alley medical care at first having to leave my wife in the hospital to take my newborn son to get simple life saving care. Never charged us a penny and one of the guys actually pulled some string to get my sons insurance activated 3 days after he was born instead of the month we were told. We’re still paying off his bills from the hospital 3 years later for those first few hours.
Tory = Republican lite. Fuck them, too.
I enthusiastically agree, but I would also qualify that Blair’s New Labour did their fair share of accelerating privatisation of the NHS too — it’s why I point the finger primarily at neoliberalism
Yeah I mean that’s similar to what we’ve got over here with the corpo Dems vs progressive caucus
*looks at decades of successful single-payer system in my country*
My view is that the NHS is its knees because systemic dysfunction isn’t enough to outrun market-based neoliberal economics. Although systemic dysfunction and neoliberal are synonyms.