Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

In the US market, where union participation is also very low, it's weird to me that this is an important reason people stay in their jobs, may influence what kind of jobs you take (full time vs contracting?), but:

- job offers generally do not want to get into details on the health insurance offering. it's not a main "competition" point

- except when subject to some kind of union negotiated contract, the employer can change their insurance options from year to year as they try to save costs, but it's not regarded as a mass pay cut when they do

- there's no standard metric on "how much do our employees pay on healthcare" (i.e. employee premium contributions, deductibles, copays), "how much time do employees spend on the phone with the insurance company", and certainly no way to feed in your last year's records of health-care to see "on plan Y you would have paid C"

Though I think the private health insurance system is a dumb waste of overhead and paperwork and misaligned incentives, I do think that people would be more willing to switch jobs if they could know their plan was at least as good as the one they were leaving, both in money spent and in employee satisfaction. Opacity, in part owing to lack of commitment from employers, makes this harder.

This is less about private healthcare and more about how employer-provided healthcare is tax advantaged. Credits and tax breaks should go to the individual so they can choose and keep their insurance through different jobs.

Good article in general but such a misleading headline and framing. The problem, as described in the article's body, is employer-provided health insurance, not private healthcare.

I'd love to decouple insurance form employment and I'd also love to do away with the private insurance system in the US. I've always had insurance and the experience has been as uniformly poor, regardless of provider, as it is continuous. Any positive interactions and outcomes have felt like happy accidents, not the system working.

Remove the private actors, the adversarial billing, the friction with providers. It, at its best, ranges from bad to outright awful.

(I'd also love to do away with tax prep — the government knows what is owed, so why make folks prepare their own count and hope it matches?)

I think the article is looking at the wrong abstraction.

private healthcare - e.g if there's a lot of private clinics - people paid cash, then yeah healthcare costs would go down & most of the care was preventive not treatment. competition naturally will force prices down & since individuals payers won't be able to afford massive amounts, the market will adjust it's prices vs having one large payer (gvt) i.e public healthcare or many private large payers(current insurance industry).

right now - the issue isn't private healthcare - but the wrong incentives to bill insurance companies massive amounts of money. then insurance companies countering back - by having large bureaucratic processes to avoid paying those large bills. typical complex systems.

My partner and I both just got new jobs after a long period of unemployment. Neither of our new employers offer subsidized health insurance. We both have chronic conditions for which we need regular access to medication. The financial cliff we will both go over going from Medicaid to paying for health insurance via Covered California, and likely paying higher prices for medication in addition to astronomically high (and increasing!) monthly premiums, is going to eat a huge percentage of our increased incomes.

I have no idea who is supposed to benefit from this system, other than the private health insurance companies.

Typically, all single payer medical cost schemes are based on government facilities and intervention. Many Americans have little faith in their government to do anything, much less handle there medical care costs. This is why the employer model still exists.

Americans are different - they see themselves as not Europe or Asians - and they are proud of that. The "rugged individual" is still an ideal many cling to as part of their identity.

It also kills many, many people, so, the profit motive needs to be permanently and forever abolished from healthcare. In the US doctors look at patients with dollar signs in their eyes and simply ask, "How much money can I squeeze out of this NPC?" leading to countless abuses, from unecessary and harmful procedures being forced on non-consenting patients (like infant genital mutilation) to denial of needed healthcare because it isn't profitable enough and has an opportunity cost.