A Glimpse into the Bureaucratic Hell of Denying Health Insurance Claims
This is a good article, but it only shows a few parts of a much more complex whole, and extrapolating from these anecdotes to a broader system is not really accurate<p>Many hospitals lose money on every Medicare and Medicaid patient. The only reason they survive is because they can charge private insurance companies more. So hospitals and health systems have been consolidating to strengthen their negotiating position against insurers<p>This article paints Medicare as the good guy, private insurance as evil, and hospitals as mixed. The reality is more complicated, and more regional, but overall healthcare is a zero sum game today between payers and providers fighting for dollars, and power comes largely from scale. In geographies where payers are bigger and stronger, they push hospitals and force many to consolidate or die. In areas where hospitals are stronger, they basically dictate price and rates can skyrocket<p>There&#x27;s a lot of bad stuff happening on all sides, and it isn&#x27;t clear that private insurance is always evil. If we become a single payer society, small providers that are struggling to survive will probably be the first to die, and providers will probably consolidate much more aggressively into massive national chains, like the Walmart of healthcare<p>The cause of a lot of healthcare issues is not one particular party (insurance, Medicare, hospitals) but a system that encourages monopoly seeking behavior without any good mechanism for regulating this