by miyek
Yes it is a scam, especially from the perspective of a healthcare provider in a non-acute care setting. Pretty much the only thing health insurance allows you to do in the United States is to have the privilege of negotiating with the insurance company when they deny you the services that your doctor has ordered. From the perspective of the insurer it is not a scam but merely a game with large stakes: namely the ability to determine not only the kind of medical treatment a patient receives, but also the timing of this treatment, and its cost. In short, those who benefit from the “scam” will not admit that it is a scam because it benefits them. The only use of health insurance is the ability to negotiate with an insurer. The only time it’s cost effective is in catastrophic emergencies. These are the life altering things people don’t expect to happen and therefore do not plan for. When people expect their health insurance to actually cover the costs of their routine healthcare, they are often surprised that their insurance does not want to pay. They don’t want to provide the specific medication, pay for the tests or procedures, and cover the cost of the doctors fees. We have been lead to believe that health insurance is intended to cover these routine expenses. The truth is that you are being ripped off by not only the insurers, but the drug companies, and medical providers, all who need to charge higher and higher prices for things that really haven’t gone up at all in price. They have been artificially inflated by the bloated and absolutely monstrous system of regulations and mountains upon mountains of redundant and useless paperwork that serves no medical purpose other than to drive up costs and allow another middleman to skim profit from denying people the medical care they think and their medical providers think they need.