Then why are there doctors turning patients down if they dont have insurance?
I've never heard of that. I thought the problem was too many doctors are working pro bono for the uninsured and passing off the costs to everyone else. When I went without insurance, I would just call up the doctor and ask how much a visit costs out of pocket. I never got refused. If you're talking about surgery or some expensive procedure, it's not surprising they would want verification of ability to pay. That would be no different in a world without insurance, except in that world, you would have to be pretty rich or else you would have to finance the procedure and pay over months or even years, just like a car payment. In this world, insurance does provide that ability to pay for those who are not rich without making them take on debt to pay it off.
Reread the article. It says that profits are 2 - 10%. The insurance industries statistics are misleading. Remember lies, damn lies and statistics.
So I should only pay attention to one of your links and ignore the other, lest I be uninformed? Think Progress links to an NPR article which links to CNN Money for the year 2006. Back then, the average profit of companies on that list is 4.6%. The total profit to revenue ratio was 6%. Better than 3%, but still low as far as profit margins are concerned. That was then, this is now.
Spending more on administration than actual health care is crazy! That's more money spent pencil pushers than doctors. Sorry, we can't cover your medical care but we're busy coding and processing your denial.
Reread the article. It says that relative to the past, the ratio of spending on medical care to administration and profits has gone down. It never claimed that they actually spent more on administration and profits than they did medical costs. The graph it provides from Price Waterhouse Coopers shows that as of 2006, 80% of revenues goes towards medical costs.
Look at those CEO salaries and you know that someone is raking in the big bucks. And it's not us! Because you and I are not in the club, friend.
I've never cared about CEO pay any more than I care about the pay of professional athletes or movie stars. When billions of dollars and thousands of employees are at stake, you don't want to go on the cheap looking for a CEO. One wrong decision could cost the company billions and it doesn't make sense to risk billions just to save millions.
Likewise, the fact that I'm not in "the club" bothers me no more than the fact that I'm not among the ranks of professional athletes or movie stars. Perhaps if I wanted, I could have gone to business school and worked my butt off to prove myself a brilliant businessman worthy of having companies compete for my services at the tune of millions of dollars a year, but that's not the life I wanted.
). The average profit for the companies on that list is around 2.4%. If you weight the companies according to their revenues (i.e. add up all their profits and divide it by the sum of all their revenues), then it's around 3.1%. Either way, it's not exactly profit-land and the increase of insurance premiums certainly does reflect the increase in medical costs.
