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Private insurance companies have earned the public’s distrust. They routinely put profitability above their policyholders’ well-being. And a system of private health insurance provision also has higher administrative costs than a single-payer system, in which the government is the sole insurer.
But the avarice and inefficiencies of private insurers are not the sole — or even primary — reasons why vital medical services are often unaffordable and inaccessible in the United States. The bigger issue is that America’s health care providers — hospitals, physicians, and drug companies — charge much higher rates than their peers in other wealthy nations.
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The Blue Cross Blue Shield insurers are either nonprofits or mutuals (the shareholders are the policyholders). So are many smaller insurers.
But nonprofit insurers are subject to many of the same pressures as other insurers. They need to keep premiums low, and they would go bankrupt if they paid every claim.
Likewise, the vast majority of hospitals are nonprofits. But nonprofit hospitals have to pay for medicines, doctor salaries, etc too. Most are barely scraping by and can’t fund clinical trials into novel genetic medicines.
Why would hospitals need to run clinical trials? Just provide the basic health care.
Oops, I read “generic medicine” as “genetic medicine”. I thought you were suggesting that hospitals start competing with pharma over new mRNA designs!
Yeah, you don’t need a clinical trial to make generic medicine. But you do need special facilities, which most hospitals probably would be unwilling to pay for.
It initially said genetic because of autocorrect, I just fixed it. And hospitals wouldn’t need to be making medicine, you need to start a corporation, like those guys that are trying to make a generic insulin. If you start selling those with even a small profit margin everything else would come down. The issue is that profits get extracted by every middle man in the system.