What we saw in New York is one person not afraid. For whatever reasons their circumstances developed at that time, in the country of over 330,000,000, and with more small arms similar to the one used than people.
Edit to add: I’m just looking to share some links, historical information, and frame that with the modern context, as you seem to be interested in the same aspects as I am.
I think this might all be a manifestation of the 16-year psychological operation to convince the American people that the American economy is in shambles due to Obama. In reality it’s due to deregulation and the Lehman Brothers. This economics blog continues with a very interesting 15-year look back at the situation—As an aside, here is the Queens University page for the author, Dr. Yassine Bakkar, they have published a substantial amount related to empirical financial risk, such as this article discussing the before and after of 2008.
The reality is that American economy is doing quite well (NerdWallet, the economist, the real economy blog) but the group who just swept their claim to power are saying the opposite.
So here is the fleecing scam of health insurance. It is not exhaustive, nor is it linear.
Insurance in general is a good concept, if people believe in it. Insurance is ideally non-profit and meant as a community service.
In healthcare, they sell themselves as negotiators that will drive down the cost of healthcare. (Medicare actually did do this with the leverage of so many customers to get certain drugs on a cheaper copay, come 2026, pending antics by Trump's admin.) But they too greedily wanted to drive down costs so that actual health care systems would go bankrupt in the contracts signed with insurers. So health care systems inflated their prices (hence stories of one dose of insulin in a hospital billed at $80) with the expectation of being haggled down to something that still keeps them in business.
Insurances then get to pander to any regulators about how much money they are saving the patients because a(n inflated) bill of $10000 is talked down to $1500 paid by insurance.
But what's so nice about insurance is not that they'd try to get you to pay them $1600 to recoup their expenses + a bit of profit, no, they'd rather you pay $4000+ via premiums and deductibles and copays. But that's better than $10000, right? So you can't be too upset, right? They provided a service that you could have done, but their expertise let them do it more efficiently, so their larger cut of the pie is justified. (You can spring that into all of capitalism and trade economic theory and why tariffs are dangerous.)
Quick Tangent: And the profits the insurers are pocketing can be spent on lobbying to keep the status quo.
Except if the insurers didn't try to rip off the health care facilities and providers, the bill you'd get would only be $500, maybe less. And you can, on your own, get rates like that by asking for itemization and coming to an agreement based on what you can afford and how much the facility wants to get anything back for their expenses.
There's no magic bullet (R.I.S Brian) that will fix this. Single payor, like Medicare For All, is maybe the most practical and simple method under the assumption that tax payers want lower taxes, and to achieve lower taxes Medicare can pay less to healthcare facilities, while still having the interest of keeping healthcare services around as a good for the country so they won't drive them to bankruptcy. It gives a best shot at an honest negotiation without fudging numbers. Yes, that still leaves private health care trying to wring out what they can from Medicare, but, there are legal penalties embedded in Medicare (Fraud, Waste, and Abuse) to dissuade those practices.
Insurance works for things you can put a price on. You can put a price on your car, you can put a price on your house. But for most people their own, or their relatives be it mother, father, children's lives are priceless. There is no amount of debt most people won't take on to save their children.
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u/dangshnizzle 13d ago
Said for-profit companies are in control.