My wife had been a terminal cancer patient for 9 years. Great insurance, but the policy had million dollar life time limit. Hit that limit and in the following year was bankrupted. She blamed herself and attempted suicide. That wreaked what strength she had left and two months later she passed.

you were robbed of more time with your wife by greed.

Sorry this happened to you.

For you

You neither. It's criminal.

And we cannot give people basic rights to an education and healthcare.

We are convinced that we are right. Therefore, any idea that comes from 'without' cannot be worth a crap and should be ridiculed and ignored. (Unless it can create even more profits for the oligarchs... then they fight to see who can patent/copyright it as well as create a good excuse sell the implementation here in the US.)

They always claim that taxes will have to rise significantly to pay for it, which I doubt because it’s insurance and drug profits that are a major part of healthcare costs. And they claim that providing healthcare would be the slippery slope to nationalizing all industry and doing away with free market capitalism. As we just saw with this election, the lack of knowledge what socialism actually is and just basic ignorance lets Republicans get away with all kinds of lies.

without exception.

Profit trumps the public good in the USA. Always.

That's the primary reason we don't have a nationwide high-speed passenger rail network. It won't be profitable, at least not for decades, anyway.

It's the primary reason we don't have a lot of things that much smaller countries have enjoyed for decades.

Americans would rather stroke their collective johnsons over the fact that we have this massive military with all the latest and greatest things that go *BOOM*, yet we have people who are convicted felons (referencing a DU'er who recently shared their story) because they simply tried to keep their heads above water while trying to get the medical care they need.

This country is broken in astonishingly dumb ways, all easily fixed if we can just get the lobbyists off Capital Hill and elect people that aren't on the take.

It's so bad we reserve it only for congressmen.

So when we fight only republicans and not the for profit no-health and no-care industries, we're sort of missing the mark, treating the symptom and not the cause.

The for profit medicine health insurance industries are going to be around for at least another four years, and we'll have to run candidates who will target them -- perhaps a younger version of Bernie Sanders -- so that we can attract more voters of any affiliation.

by the republicans (with the help of their corporate echo chambers scaring voters about not just Socialism but Communism) and the likes of Manchin and Sinema (who only care about their own egos for donations, not the People).

Maxwell Frost from Florida comes to mind. The youngest in Congress just got re-elected and knows how government and lobbying work. He thinks fast on his feet, has a command of stats and focuses on core anti-corporate issues, and can attract young voters who need their lives future proofed.

and the masses unquestioningly assume Socialism is worse than any other evil. That it would turn us into Venezuela or the USSR.
Even Dem leadership runs from it. They say it's too expensive and label promoters as too radical.
Time to get over that.

Is this daylight robbery by insurance companies ever seriously discussed by our lawmakers? How many of them have gone bankrupt due to medical costs? Why do we need health insurance companies? What good do they actually do?

They say "glad its you and not me"

Last edited Fri Dec 6, 2024, 03:21 PM - Edit history (1)

Lobbying Congress:

$5,860,000 in 2024
$10,760,000 in 2023

Top Recipients Campaign Funds 2024

Harris, Kamala $774,019
Republican National Cmte $207,125
National Republican Congressional Cmte $163,776
Trump, Donald $144,297
DNC Services Corp $103,022
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte $68,741

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/unitedhealth-group/recipients?id=D000000348

What an effed up system of government we have. It's all about money.

Kamala's campaign was so much about health care... women's healthcare specifically. Has kamala made any statement about this? I think it's shameful.

We need to know where we stand.

could be a very good motive for someone killing United Health's CEO. Myself, I'm surprised it doesn't happen far more often.

At the close of 2019, the average household had a credit card debt of $7,499. During the first quarter of 2021, it dropped to $6,209.

In 2022, credit card debt rose again to $7,951 and has increased linearly. In 2023, it reached $8,599 — $75 shy of the 2024 average.

https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/average-amount-credit-card-debt

Now, add that into the medical, educational and emergency debt from fire, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc....YIKES.

And the insurance companies can kiss my old ass, they're thieves.

even 643K more reasons to get medicare for all. Ya think Bernie might have been onto something years ago?

when most people are on the MA scams, Medicare will cease to exist

"Medicare for all" was always a pipe dream

Abolition was a pipe dream; women's suffrage was a pipe dream; an end to polio was a pipe dream at one time.

Insurance companies get wealthier, off the deaths of others. There should be a law, against that. There is but it doesn't apply , to the top one percent. Thank you GOP!!!!

After her long battle with clostridium dificil, United's games with repeated hospitalizations and refusal to pay for her rehab we were bankrupted. Then she died.
I have no sympathy for insurance mongers.
May they get exactly what they deserve.

After three radiation treatments early on, the insurance company declared the next treatment was for a pre-existing condition and declined to continue paying. She was horrified. Of course "pre-existing" - duh, it was the same cancer being treated as from the beginning. Her oncologist was furious and wrote something to Aetna so commandingly fierce they quickly relented and began paying again.
Would that we all, under American health care, had doctors with such ability to cast a corrective curse upon an insurance company.

…pass it on I need some kind of support.

https://balancingeverything.com/medical-bankruptcies-statistics/

Sure, many people in Europe and Canada do go bankrupt when they get sick, but it's not due to medical bills specifically because their Universal Healthcare systems do not charge them with medical bills ($0) when they use their government-issued paperwork or credit-card-size medical card with a picture for ID in Canada.

Mostly, when these people declare bankruptcy, it's because they were already in jeopardy credit-wise for other reasons not related to medical bills from Doctors and Hospitals before they got sick and could not keep their payments going on time, mostly because they either had to stop working or they lost their job or their small business or other reasons than explicit medical bills.

In Canada, there are provincial-government-managed insurance systems for pharmaceuticals (pills and medication) which also allows people who can afford private insurance to opt out of those programs with proof of their private coverage. Also, the federal government is gradually installing programs for dental coverage (totally free of charge for anyone earning less than $90,000 CDN per year). Actually, children up to 18 and seniors 65+ can benefit from that system.

To give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires. And to ban abortions...

Conservatives are real Cruel f*cks.

And guess what... he leads in the polls at the moment.

Stupid people who vote against their own interests collectively are not just in the US...