Yaaaay, as of 97 minutes ago I am no longer covered by United Health Care. Yippeee!!!
@karlauerbach Yay, I think. I just started with them. They're THE provider around here.
@shuttersparks Here in Santa Cruz county there are rather few Medicare Advantage offerings - far fewer than in Las Vegas, and all with much worse coverage. I do not understand why the law allows such massive differences based on location.
But I'm back to regular medicare+medigap now.
@karlauerbach Hmm, well I have yet to see how well this plan works.
The medical care situation here in the USA is ridiculous. Countries like Germany have had universal healthcare since forever. It's not rocket science but the billionaires here don't want it.
All you have to do is allow medical insurance companies to operate but governed by a traditional "public utilities commission". Like utilities were managed in the US and still are in some places.
"Okay, we (the government) regulate you as a utility. That means we have all your numbers and we determine how much profit you will make. Since you deal in billions of dollars a reasonable corporate profit is something like 3 percent. In exchange we will guarantee you that profit, regardless of what happens. Deal?" Easy peasy.
@karlauerbach Yes, true, but I was referring to how the PUC used to operate back in the 1960s. Today, everything has been corrupted by monied interests.
@shuttersparks Well, living here in California we learn the that in theory theory and practice are the same but in practice they are not.
For instance, PG&E - a regulated utility. But our PUC (pronounced "puke") allowed PG&E to be a hedge fund darling that sent all profits to shareholders rather than maintaining their lines. The result was the incineration of a lot of customers in San Bruno and Paradise, Calif. Even in our neighborhood we can see PG&E being cheapskate and letting us suffer outages.
As for "profit", even non-profits can make people wealthy or at least extremely well paid - look at Goodwill or ICANN. And as the Credit Mobelier scandal of the 1860's taught - it can be quite easy to hide profits. Now a days it is even easier - as Apple and Google did when they put their intellectual property into Irish corporate ownership and then paid to license those rights back to the mothership company.
So yes, regulation is needed, but it is, alone, insufficient.