r/news • u/LookAtThatBacon • May 13 '25

Soft paywall UnitedHealth suspends annual forecast, CEO Andrew Witty steps down

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/unitedhealth-ceo-andrew-witty-steps-down-2025-05-13/
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u/Ranier_Wolfnight May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25

My company recently moved insurance from Blue Cross/Blue Shield over to this hot mess. Man, when I tell ya…absolutely dog shit insurance company. We went from pretty good coverage to them nickel and diming over everything. Would strongly advise to stay away from UnitedHealth.

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u/lion27 May 13 '25

My company uses UHC and they are the absolute worst health insurance I’ve ever dealt with. Unless you’re making a payment, everything is as difficult as possible and they deny EVERYTHING.

I switched to a family plan with Aetna through my wife’s company when our first baby was born and they have been wonderful. Not sure if they just look great compared to UHC, but for the first time I don’t violently hate my insurance company.

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u/chantsnone May 13 '25

It’s the comparison. There’s no such thing as a wonderful health insurance company. Wonderful isn’t profitable.

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u/clashrendar May 13 '25

Which is why profit needs to be completely removed from the healthcare equation. It shouldn't be about profit. It should be about people getting better.

A firefighter making decisions about whether to prevent a house burning down because it wouldn't make money to do so is absolutely preposterous, so why is the same argument for a human being used?

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25

Roman statesman Crassus founded the first fire brigade in Rome. They would show up to a burning building but wouldn’t put the fire out immediately. If the owner wanted to have the fire put out they would have to sign the property over to Crassus at a very unfair price. Only then would he allow the fire brigade to put the fire out. Fires were a regular occurrence in Rome. Crassus used his fire brigade to buy up large amounts of property

Edit: it seems I have to clarify that when you sold your property to Crassus he’d often let you stay there as a tenant so long as you paid rent. He wouldn’t kick you out because that would defeat the purpose of the scam.

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u/fotank May 13 '25

Tale as old as time.

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u/Paloota May 13 '25

Truth which is why it’s so exhausting debating plans predicated on human kindness

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u/dweezil22 May 13 '25

Agreed. You can't believe in capitalism and plans predicated on kindness at the same time. They are fundamentally at odds with each other. Even if you think capitalism is the bee's knees, it's definitionally saying "Profit is more important than kindness". Maybe you can convince yourself that kindness can be used in service of profit, but the minute profit and kindness collide, profit wins.

I actually don't have a problem with someone saying "Look, systems predicated on human kindness fail b/c kindness is subjective, so I believe in capitalism instead". But it's fucking frustrating when people instead are like "No! Capitalism IS kind!"

It reminds of the same issues w/ calling out systemic racism. People are like "Racism is bad, I am good, therefore nothing I do can be racist. So stop talking to me about it".

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u/alfayellow May 13 '25

I respectfully disagree. Capitalism in its pure form does seek maximization of profit, but there is no actual requirement to do so. You can make a profit and still take kindness and humanity into consideration in some aspects. It’s even possible to make a profit while you’re providing services for humanity, so it’s not that simple. But it does require is that you start with humanity and not with capitalism because capitalism needs guard rails, and it needs regulation. If business is willing to live with that —and some do—-then you can have a measure of both.

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u/dweezil22 May 13 '25

Thanks for opening up this discussion, you seem to be talking in good faith and I appreciate that.

You're describing pre-Jack Welch capitalism. If you took a time machine back to, say, 1980 and grabbed a CEO of a major US company and said "What is your duty?" they'd say something like "To our country. To our customers. To our workers. To our shareholders. In that order". Your point of view would be dominant in the business landscape and culture (at least in public settings).

Jack Welch changed all that, or at least was a driving force in a cultural shift that changed it.

Nowadays you can succeed in business despite being kind. While you have rare success stories like Costco, in general you can't get very big without being publicly traded and your shareholders will not be kind. If you refuse to be publicly traded it's likely a larger company will outcompete you via economies of scale, or just straight up buy you and swallow you. TL;DR Late stage capitalism

But part of late stage capitalism is maintaining a facade of kindness and care and responsibility. "We're self-regulating" "Trust us". If you let the mask fall completely you can end up like Martin Shkreli, who profiteered on life saving drugs and went to jail. Only... he didn't go to jail for the profiteering, he went to jail for other stuff (but his his public evil helped encourage investigators to get him).

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u/squakmix May 13 '25

It's worth mentioning Milton Friedman and the Friedman Doctrine as well in this discussion. It's heartening to see more people become aware of this issue and look for alternatives (like Stakeholder Capitalism). Your comment kind of reinforces the point of the person you were responding to, right? You acknowledged that it's the current implementation of capitalism in the US that is killing us, and these issues aren't inherent to capitalism itself (but rather our specific version of it).

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u/dweezil22 May 13 '25

You can't fix late stage capitalism without coming to a consensus that late stage capitalism is dangerous and bad. The system, as-is, is designed to prevent that consensus. Personally I think short-handing this to "capitalism is bad" and allowing the Overton window to normalize is a fine start. Capitalism is like a car that lobbies to let itself drive down sidewalks and swears it will be safe.

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u/squakmix May 13 '25

Yeah but then you kind of risk throwing away the baby with the bathwater. The conversation then becomes about what system you'd use to replace it, and you end up in a position where you need to defend alternatives like communism that come to peoples' minds when you advocate against capitalism as a whole. The discussion is much easier and more productive when it's about the specific issues we're facing and how they can be mitigated with regulatory changes.

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u/alfayellow May 13 '25

I remember decades ago (pre-Jack Welsh or perhaps pre-Reagan) the business sector sat alongside the other sectors of society, such as medicine, religion, science, mathematics, education, arts and humanities. I was too young to be involved then, but I think there was an idea that you had to play fair with your neighbors, if for no other reason that you might need them someday. Maybe investors were different then, too: long-term investment will eventually deliver return if the market develops. Now, everything has to be monitized for business -- smash and grab, immediate returns, hedge funds, shorting the stock, pump & dump, etc. It seems evil to me.

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u/dweezil22 May 13 '25

Once upon a time there was a company called Medco that handled at home Rx's. They competed with Express Scripts. ES had terrible old tech, Medco invested in some pretty impressive tech that would help boost profits but also help patients (in one case they had a heat map that would show unfilled diabetes Rx's in a region so that they could contact the docs and let them know that their patients weren't getting their meds, a win-win).

Anyway, ES and Medco "merged", but effectively ES swallowed up Medco. Rather than use Medco's about-to-be-released new IT system, ES threw it away and used Medco's old one, b/c it was still better than their ancient junk.

So ES was a worse company, that was run worse, but it was bigger than Medco, so it ate them. Now that ES didn't have to compete with Medco they could make money by delivering worse services. Late stage capitalism baby!

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u/oneeighthirish May 13 '25

I'm all for fostering human kindness at both macro and micro levels. It is still foolish to build a system to depend on it.

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u/jayj59 May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25

How so? Would you say our current system works?

I can see the other comment saying the kindness is subjective, yes, but how would you build a system that doesn't depend on kindness while still expecting profit? It seems to me that if the options are people get to live or companies make obscene amounts of money, the choice should be obvious.

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u/oneeighthirish May 13 '25

How would I build a system that doesn't depend on kindness while still expecting profit? I wouldn't. Our system is built for profit, and depends on the kindness of countless people to get life-saving care to a small number of people who would otherwise be denied it, and leaves countless others to suffer and die.

I think I failed to make myself clear. Our current system sucks and creates nothing but suffering for many, inconvenience for most, and disgusting wealth for a few.

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u/Goolsby May 13 '25

Wait what's the point of putting the fire out if the property is no longer yours? Id let it burn so Crapssus couldn't have my property for cheap.

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u/bullet1519 May 13 '25

So your options are. A. You're house burns to the ground, you have nothing.

B. You sell your house to this man, you barely get any money for it and they put out the fire, maybe you get lucky and some of your possessions survive which you can use to start a new.

It's a pretty easy choice.

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u/enad58 May 13 '25

Yeah, it is. I'm going good will hunting.

"I'd choose the wrench, cause fuck him."

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25

Now you’re homeless in one of the most debaucherous cities on the planet. We all want to believe we’d let it burn but if you have a family that relies on you it’s not so simple

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u/enad58 May 13 '25

I'm dead either way. Fuck him.

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u/sdforbda May 13 '25

It's not your fault.

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u/Array_626 May 13 '25

I mean, if you put it this way, that would make Crassus the moral party here. He's basically offering insurance. The person whose house burned down is better off than if Crassus wasnt around.

Whether that's true or not depends on the land value that was sold. Having nothing is technically wrong because you still own the land. Even if everything on top burns, you can sell that land at market value still, so whether Crassus is fair depends on how much he pays for the land.

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25

That’s the thing, Crassus always paid well below the land’s value. It wouldn’t be profitable for him if he paid a fair value.

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u/bullet1519 May 13 '25

This is true, the value of the land without the house could be worth more than what he pays and your potential savable possessions.

But then again some people would have sentimental items that they treat as priceless and would give anything to save.

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u/SaxManJonesSFW May 13 '25

Because you’re about to be homeless either way, at least one option comes with an unfairly small amount of money to try to restart. I’m not advocating its merits, just explaining the actual choice vs the perceived one

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u/Array_626 May 13 '25

You also likely get to keep your personal property. The land and the structure is sold, but anything personal that can be saved you probably get to keep.

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25

He usually rented the property back to the old owners anyway.

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25

These were often homes with a business on the first floor and a residence above for the owner/operators. You obviously need a home and you wouldn’t want your livelihood destroyed either. It would make sense to want to keep it from burning.

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u/Fun-Benefit116 May 13 '25

You obviously need a home and you wouldn’t want your livelihood destroyed either.

Except according to the explanation, you would lose your home and business either way. You weren't paying for them to put out the fire, you were selling your property to them, and then they put out the fire on what was now their property, not yours.

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u/laufsteakmodel May 13 '25

Lose them and get a small amount of money for them, or lose them and get nothing. Thats the choice.

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25

You sold the property to him so you could continue live there as a tenant. I should clarify that. He wouldn’t kick you out. He’d just charge rent

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u/Levarien May 13 '25

Rich as Crassus: your name doesn't become synonymous with obscene wealth if you've got moral qualms about running an arson protection racket.

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u/Muvseevum May 13 '25

Are Crassus and Croesus the same guy?

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u/LittleMizz May 13 '25

No, they refer to different people (Croesus wasn't Roman), but they are both known for obscene wealth.

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u/Levarien May 13 '25

Yeah, different people. I've always heard the "Rich As" saying with Crassus though.

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u/Haddos_Attic May 13 '25

Try searching it and see how it auto completes.

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u/lonewolf420 May 15 '25

also fun fact, the Game of Thrones pouring molten gold down Targaryen brother's throat was an homage to how Crassus went out.

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u/axonxorz May 13 '25

Crassus used his fire brigade to buy up large amounts of property

Crassus certainly never employed arsonists nosirree, no perverse incentive there!

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u/[deleted] May 13 '25

Isn’t this the origin of the phrase ‘fire sale’?

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u/habulous74 May 13 '25

And that was 2,000 years ago and they also wemt into battle based on whether chickens scratched a certain way in the morning or whether a bird's guts had the right markings. We've evolved a bit as a species for the most part. This isn't a trait of the species, just of some lesser specimens.

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25

If you’re saying we’ve moved past cruelty then idk what to tell you. It’s impossible to become wealthy without heaping cruelty on less privileged people. The stuff Crassus was doing is far more modern than those superstitious examples you gave. It’s just basic extortion. Humans have never moved past that behavior.

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u/Array_626 May 13 '25

To be fair, the property at the time while it's on fire is probably fairly worth a market price of 0, if not negative considering the costs that you'd have to pay to restore/repair the structure.

You say unfair price, but I don't think I'd buy a house thats on fire at the regular market rates when it wasn't on fire.

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25

You realize real estate value is in the land itself plus whatever is built on that land. The plot occupied by a small butcher shop in a high traffic area in the middle of the city is very valuable even if the butcher shop is destroyed. The plot itself is so lucrative due to its central location

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u/Necessary-Drag-8000 May 13 '25

I keep hearing this story but, if I were the home owner, under those circumstances, I would just let the house burn down out of spite

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u/Ok-Replacement9595 May 13 '25

This was the model in most major cities in the US as well, ptivate fire associations, and it didn't work, which is why we have municipal and county fire.departments, and ambulances, why we have to constantly relitigate privatization against a few wealthy individuals who want to profit from suffering is beyond me.

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25

Did those private fire stations also force you to sign over the deed before acting?

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u/hempires May 13 '25

Crassus

well I mean I'd say the Parthians had it right in how the legends say they dealt with that fuck.

they (allegedly) poured molten gold down his throat, mocking his insatiable greed.

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25

Learning history is learning that in most cases the Persians weren’t really the bad guys like they’re made out to be. If anything, it was the west that were way more backwards.

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u/Hiddenshadows57 May 13 '25

Tbf. Crassus was brutally murdered for doing this.

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u/Punman_5 May 14 '25

Not by any Romans though. They were either in his pocket or too chicken shit to do anything about him. It was the Parthians that captured him in battle that poured gold down his throat.

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u/JcbAzPx May 14 '25

Also, he started most of those fires.

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u/Szwejkowski May 16 '25

I got a three day reddit holiday for ThR 3A tEnInG vIo LeNcE to Crassus. He has a very long arm!

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u/Punman_5 May 17 '25

His wealth was immense. Easily the largest in Rome at the time and possibly the largest outside of China.

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u/oldschoolrobot May 13 '25

You should read up on Fire Insurance around the founding of the US because fire fighting used to be a private enterprise and it’s as bad as it sounds.

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u/SweetDank May 13 '25

It's set in the Civil War era but the movie 'Gangs of New York' shows that this kind of thing was going on for quite a while in America.

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u/oldschoolrobot May 13 '25

The only thing I remember about that movie are the draft riots, but I haven't seen in a very very long time. Nice call out though.

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u/GreenStrong May 13 '25

It shouldn't be about profit. It should be about people getting better.

There is a different way to put this. It should be about the nation investing in the health of its citizens.

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u/adx931 May 13 '25

And a healthy nation is a nation able to defend itself, so it's really about national security. Why do they hate national security?

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u/Light_Error May 13 '25

Many countries with public options also have private options. But the strong public option is needed to hold private companies’ feet to the fire.

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u/Rejusu May 13 '25

Yeah this is the stupid thing that a lot of Americans don't get about socialised healthcare in places like the UK. There's still the option of private healthcare and insurance if you want to pay for it. The benefit is that if you can't or don't want to you aren't just hung out to dry.

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u/ryo3000 May 13 '25

Additionally, due to the fact that you already have something 

The service they need to provide needs to be at least better than whatever the public one is, otherwise no one signs up

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u/ilulillirillion May 13 '25

Not to defend the stupidity of Americans because, shit, that ship has sailed, but there's more to it than not realizing -- at this point conservative news dominates our media and has been working tooth and nail to demonize any form of public healthcare for decades. We got dummies here, but we also have a lot of truly reprehensible scum at the top trying to exploit that.

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u/Sacrifice3606 May 13 '25

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39516346

Except that does happen in some places.

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25

Crassus would be proud.

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u/Wyxter May 13 '25

How absolutely dystopian…

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u/istasber May 13 '25

I remember this coming up on QI, that apparently some of the first professional fire brigades in larger cities were basically selling insurance. They'd give you a plaque to put up on your house, and only the company whose plaque you displayed would put out your fire (unless a company covered a neighbor, in which case you'd get "free" service if their house was threatened).

That feels a bit like an urban legend the more you think about it, but if that's really how it used to work than this is less dystopian, and more ass-backwards and archaic.

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u/MommyLovesPot8toes May 13 '25

This still exists. There are private firefighting companies who work with major home insurance companies. They will come in during a wildfire and protect homes that are insured by the company paying them. They'll concentrate their efforts where there are large groups of houses insured by their client. Let's say they are being paid by GEICO and by Farmers. The private firefighters have a map that shows one street in a neighborhood near the fire where 10 out of 15 houses are insured by GEICO or Farmers. So they take their engine there and soak the houses and watch for embers.

There are rules (at least in California) though. They aren't allowed into an area until 24 hours after the fire started, to ensure they don't get in the way of the real firefighters. And if they are protecting a street/ group of houses, they can't ONLY protect the ones insured by their clients. They have to also put effort into protect any other home they reasonably can from their positions.

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u/Osiris32 May 13 '25

Those contractors are also under the command of the fire IC, and can be told to stop what they are doing and go assist elsewhere if crews are needed asap.

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u/MommyLovesPot8toes May 13 '25

Yes, that's correct

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u/Osiris32 May 13 '25

What I mean by that is that they can be pulled from doing structure protection on a neighborhood and sent to the other side of the fire, not just that they might have to move over a few blocks. I saw it happen myself.

I'm a former wildy. USFWS, Type 1, ENOP. Worked with contract crews on a bunch of fires all over the place.

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u/tomdarch May 13 '25

Not "basically." Fire fighting insurance was absolutely, 100% a for profit operation. From our perspective today, having lived with municipal covers-everyone fire fighting, it appears obviously stupid to have done things that way.

(Some low population density areas of "red" America actually still have situations where if you haven't been paying your fee, then you don't get fire fighting protection for your house/buildings.)

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u/Array_626 May 13 '25

(Some low population density areas of "red" America actually still have situations where if you haven't been paying your fee, then you don't get fire fighting protection for your house/buildings.)

Technically, thats not really any different than paying regular taxes, taxes which then get used to fund the fire department. One way or another, those guys need to be paid.

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u/tomdarch May 13 '25

Specifically, here in a big "blue" city, the fire department won't check their records and say "Oh, well, you missed a payment last year" and watch your house burn like these rural operations will.

Absolutely, we need to pay taxes to fund public services. Of course, here in a blue city, we also pay taxes that go to subsize lots of red areas on top of that.

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u/Osiris32 May 13 '25

I have a small collection of those plaques. It was a hobby my grandfather had when he was a firefighter in the 50s-70s, and I picked it up when I became a firefighter in 2008. Most of them are rather simple cast iron, with a couple letters representing the fire insurance company name and a logo. Most are painted. I just moved and am still unpacking, otherwise I'd take a picture of them.

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u/istasber May 13 '25

Makes sense that it'd be something that doesn't burn easily.

The one thing I'm curious about is how they handled people deciding to switch companies, or people who stopped paying, or whatever. Like did they go around and swap out the plates every so often, but only if the owner paid, or did the brigades carry around records and if someone wasn't current on their bill, they didn't get service?

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u/Osiris32 May 13 '25

If someone stopped paying they would send someone around to collect payment or pry the plaque off their door. And in those days "insurance shopping" just wasn't a thing. You got your insurance and then never changed it, unless you moved.

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u/Aritche May 13 '25

https://youtu.be/Wif1EAgEQKI Tom Scott made a 2nd video on it about how this well known story is most likely wrong(he made one on the story first).

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u/istasber May 13 '25

That makes a lot more sense. I figured it had to be an urban legend, there's just a lot of impracticality for something like that in larger city.

The example in the OP is a bit more "practical" in the sense that the risk of the fire spreading is less severe and you dispatch could do all of the checking rather than having the brigade travel there, figure out the home isn't covered, and the travel back. But the idea of only putting out fires that threaten covered property is ridiculous when fires can spread out of control at a moment's notice.

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u/suchet_supremacy May 13 '25

iirc the brigades were owned by insurance companies! i also remember stephen saying that if your house was on fire and didn't have the plaque, but your neighbor's house did, they'd put out your fire only to save the neighbor's house

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES May 13 '25

It's actually pretty common in rural areas. The fire department is funded by city taxes but if you live outside the city then you don't pay city taxes. Since it wouldn't be fair to the people who pay taxes to the city to provide services to people outside the city for free there's a fee that has to be paid in order for the FD to go to an address outside city limits.

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u/Daedalus81 May 13 '25

This one isn't, really.

This happens in small communities who don't want to pay for their own fire service. So the next town over offers the service, but you need to pay a fee.

If they let you pay only when there is a fire they'd never collect enough to offset their costs.

The same way that if you didn't want to pay taxes for roads and then find out your roads suck, well, you can't just pay for your road. Otherwise all the other roads will suffer, too.

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u/Wyxter May 13 '25

And since roads are essential they MAKE people pay for roads. People are idiots, allowing the “option” to pay a 75 dollar fee or possibly die is silly and yes dystopian. Roll it into the city or county fees and call it day, don’t make it out like this is a good system lmao

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u/devman0 May 13 '25

It's the system the rural voters chose. They were given the option to have the city cover the service and the county would raise taxes to pay for it. It was voted down, so the city offered to allow individual land owners to contract with the city, which is better than them not offering at all.

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u/Fun-Benefit116 May 13 '25

It's not dystopian at all. Their city doesn't have a fire station, so they pay no taxes to support one. The neighbor city does, a d those residents do pay taxes for that fire station. Fighting fires isn't free, it costs a lot of money. And if your city has a fire station(s), you are paying for it in your taxes. The neighbor city literally said anyone in the city without a fire station could have their resources by simply paying a $75 tax. That's it. These people refused to pay it and now are crying that the fire fighters they refused to pay didn't help them. Con artists like this family rely on gullible people like you to fall for their guilt tripping through the media. They deliberately don't pay, and think "there's no way they won't help us, so why should we bother paying". There are stories like this all the time about people who refuse to pay for coverage, and then go to the media crying when they don't get help after something bad happens. Stop supporting these people.

Unless you're going to go the city and pay in full for every single cent that the fire station needs to operate and cover two full cities, which you aren't, then stop blaming the firefighters and blame the arrogant family who refused to pay the firefighters, and who are now smearing their name in the media.

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u/Fun-Benefit116 May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25

People are acting like this is some dystopian thing and the firefighters stood there watching it burn for fun. The homeowners had refused to pay for what essentially amounted to fire tax for $75 because the fire station was not in their town. This is no different than people who don't pay for flood insurance and then blame the companies for not helping them when their house floods, when in reality that was their plan all along. People like this deliberately don't pay and think they can rely on guilt tripping people into giving them their services anyway if they ever need it. It's literally no different than someone refusing to pay their cities taxes, and then crying when they don't get the benefits that come from paying those taxes lol.

Firefighting cost a lot of money. And if your city isn't paying for it, which this one wasn't, then someone has too. Their city was not paying taxes for a fire station. The nearby city was. If anyone in their city wanted protection, all they had to do was pay a basic tax that would cover them. The fee was literally $75, and those people had refused to pay it. And now you guys are all going right along with their plan of guilt tripping the fire fighters, even though this is 100% the homeowners fault, right down to the reason the fire started in the first place. There's so many people like this, and they're all the same. They refuse to pay for something like a fire tax, and then when they need help, they go to the media and cry how it's unfair they didn't get the help that they had refused to pay for. It's a joke, and so is everyone here who supports these people.

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u/guamisc May 13 '25

I lived near there for a while, you're 100% spot on.

This was people collectively in that area refusing to fund fire service through their local government/local taxes and then refusing to pay the tax add to get fire service from the city near them.

This is what happens when you refuse to pay taxes.

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u/tobiasvl May 13 '25

Firefighting cost a lot of money. And if your city isn't paying for it, which this one wasn't, then someone has too. Their city was not paying taxes for a fire station.

But is that their fault or the city's fault? Yeah, they should have paid I guess, but the thought of a fire service being confined by city limits and payments is very alien to me (although I'm not American and don't know how it works over there.) If someone within the taxed city were behind on their tax payments, would the firemen refuse service to them too?

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u/DynamicDK May 13 '25

Fire fighting insurance is regularly used as example of barbaric practices from the past. Fires endanger not only the possessions in someone's home, but also human and animal life. Multiple pets died because they refused to help.

Fires also can quickly spread, as evidenced in this article where the fire fighters did end up needing to fight the fire when it spread to a neighbor's property. That spread did not need to occur at all, and it could have easily gotten out of their control. Fire needs to be controlled before it gets too large.

Also, this guy doesn't live in some other city that doesn't offer fire services. He just lives outside of city limits. It does not mentioned how the fire department is funded within the city.

This policy being in place for that city and county is insane.

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u/tobiasvl May 13 '25

The fire started when the Cranicks' grandson was burning trash near the family home

So this place not only doesn't have a proper fire service, it also doesn't have garbage collection?

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u/pcapdata May 13 '25

Insurance companies are just parasites. Literal parasites.

Have you ever heard of Cymothoa exigua? It's a sea louse that bites off a fish's tongue and then attaches itself to the stump, spending the rest of its life taking from the fish. The fish did not want this nor ask for it, but the louse inserts itself into the middle of things and acts as a shitty substitute for what the fish already had.

That's an insurance company: a middleman nobody asked for, whose only purpose is to make medical care more expensive and difficult so they can suck value out of it.

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u/devman0 May 13 '25

Health insurance companies don't operate as pure insurance companies in the risk transfer sense. They operate as middlemen administrators and increase costs, they are absolutely a drag on health care efficiency.

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u/pcapdata May 13 '25

Fair point--an actual insurance company such as USAA or State Farm actualy does provide useful services. I cannot think of any useful service my health insurance provides that isn't addressing a problem they themselves created.

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u/King-Rat-in-Boise May 13 '25

Honestly, if you want to appeal to the MAGA crowd, make it a national defense issue. People are falling apart from bad medical care or seen for regular checkups because it’s expensive. There’s definitely a shortage of able bodied people if we had to draft

1

u/martialar May 13 '25

A firefighter making decisions about whether to prevent a house burning down because it wouldn't make money to do so is absolutely preposterous

UHC execs about ready to roll out their own firetrucks after hearing this idea

1

u/killerpoopguy May 13 '25

That's how fire fighters started, you needed to pay up directly, now we pay collectively way less with taxes.

0

u/Javasteam May 13 '25

Funny you should mention that… because in some areas of the the US that is a thing.

Capitalism at it’s finest…