Americans Angry about Flawed Health Insurance

January 7, 2025

Americans Are Angry About Their Health Insurance – With Good Reason
Common Dreams
Jan. 1, 2025
By Claudia Fegan, MD (National Coordinator, PNHP)

As a physician, I have seen patients suffer and die in order to pad the bottom lines of corporate health insurers – and in recent years I have seen this problem getting much worse.

How should we react when a man is shot to death on the street on his way to work? Our humanity tells us that we should be shocked and horrified.

 So why did hundreds of thousands of people have the exact opposite reaction when UnitedHealthcare’s CEO was executed in New York City? Because Americans are furious with health insurance corporations – and they have every right to be.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, many Americans took to social media to celebrate. Sympathetic statements were met with rancor – and in the case of UnitedHealth Group’s own statement, over 70,000 “laugh reactions” before the company made that tally private.

As a physician who’s treated countless victims of gun violence, and whose life’s work is to care for all of my patients, I found this response to be deeply unnerving.

For decades, health insurance corporations like United have been taking in as much money as possible in premiums and paying out as little as possible in medical claims. They have tried everything from requiring “prior authorization” of care, to excluding high-quality providers from their networks, to imposing a Byzantine series of charges including ever-growing copays, coinsurance and deductibles. When all else fails, many insurers simply deny claims.

Behind each of these practices are millions of Americans who are made to suffer. I hear these stories routinely in my practice, and they never become easier to stomach. I have seen patients with aggressive cancer who avoided seeing a doctor for months because they feared bankruptcy; patients with chronic conditions like diabetes who are denied treatments that would improve their quality of life; and gunshot victims whose fight to recover and gain a semblance of normalcy is complicated by their health plans saying no, no, and no again.

I have seen patients suffer and die in order to pad the bottom lines of corporate health insurers – and in recent years I have seen this problem getting much worse.

Are we listening? And what are we going to do about it? Both the Affordable Care Act and the Medicare Advantage program have only succeeded in ballooning the profits of firms like United – without improving Americans’ health or sparing their wallets.

What would help is a proven reform proposal that is long overdue: a single-payer national health program. Such a system would provide universal coverage and comprehensive benefits – with zero out-of-pocket costs.

Americans are crying out in pain. We should listen to those cries and we should finally, after decades of delay, do something about it.

 

Comment by: Don McCanne

I started in practice before Medicare and Medicaid were implemented. What a relief it was to see seniors finally able to receive care without facing significant financial barriers to that care. And others living in poverty were also able to receive care since their financial barriers were removed, and Medicaid did cover overhead, allowing dedicated physicians to practice without worrying about negative cash flows.

But there were still too many patients who remained uninsured or whose employer-sponsored plans were shifting more expenses to the patient through higher premiums and cost sharing, while limiting patient choices through managed care manipulations.

With my growing dissatisfaction with our health care system, it was in 1989 that I read an article in JAMA, written by Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program, that described a single, tax-funded national health program that they supported. That was it! Precisely what we needed! I immediately became affiliated with their organization. Claudia Fegan became one of my mentors, leading me through the early stages of my involvement. She has been an inspiration to me ever since.

Her article explaining how the defects in our health care financing system only continue to grow certainly resonates with me. We now have the most expensive health care system which performs worse than all other modern nations. We recently estimated in HJM as many as 200,000 deaths each year due to insurance problems like those described by Dr. Fegan. You can see why I am absolutely elated to see her article as she continues to fight for the cause of health care justice for all.

The tragedy of the assassination pains us all, but the enormity of the public reaction to the injustice that the private insurers inflict upon the American people suggests that there is hope that we will finally fix the system. If our legislators and administration do not respond to the current protests, it means that we need to raise our voices even louder (while refraining from assassinations and Jan. 6-type events, since, in our mission, we revere life).