it would be known as usury in an earlier period, say, 13th century Italy
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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waiting for a medical group to bypass them and collect premiums directly. if only to end insurance paperwork costs. it is a drag on everyone's bottom line. aside from price distortions.
Horrible place for a conflict of interest
Capitalism is basically about making as much money as possible with as few products/services as possible. Health insurance is one of the best ways to achieve that.
You forgot the most important part of capitalism which is exploiting labor.
Now imagine a country where there is public healthcare, but it is blasted and underpaid so often by crony politicians because "healthcare" companies AND medics have a large pool of crony politicians to pay
Now imagine the lesser of two evils.
I was just asking people to imagine Brazil :P
- You only say that because you live in Brazil and think the problems you list must be unique.
- You were making a cheeky stab at public healthcare, so I made a cheeky stab back.
And the UK and Canada. Maybe not as bad as Brazil, but the NHS is Britain is being eroded every single day.
This is why even the best welfare states are not good enough. The greed of the rich and the bendy spines of politicians will slowly chip away at the systems and privatize them.
Please don‘t extrapolate from the US healthcare system to insurances in general. Insurances collect money from many so in the case something happens to an individual that individual doesn‘t need take the full financial loss. This makes a lot of sense, because it would very inefficient if everyone would save money in order to pay for a potential cancer treatment. Cancer is rare, but in aggregate it is just small amount each month.
The job of the insurance is to define that monthly amount (which is not trivial to do), collect it, store it and eventually pay it out.
On another note, unless an insurance is mandatory you can usually opt to pay yourself.
It’s all a scam and if it doesn’t feel like that yet just you wait!
I just bought a new car. Been driving over twenty years, not a single accident or ticket ever in my life. It was a fucking Toyota Corolla. THEY TRIED TO CHARGE ME MORE A MONTH FOR INSURANCE THAN THE FUCKING CAR PAYMENT!
I was on the phone and I said to geico, you think you deserve a car and a half every fucking month to insure my one car? They told me I would never find a lower rapt that’s what everyone is going to be paying soon.
I found a lower rate… like 10% of what they quoted. Fucking con artists. Every single person that works in insurance should know they are the enemy.
You would think that. But most decent sized companies self insure. That means they figure out how much to hold in savings to cover potential costs. They probably pay someone for that number. The premium is just to pay the insurance company to manage billing. It is basically an administrative fee. That puts them in the position that employers will choose the insurance company that cost them the least, mainly by denying claims. It's a system designed to extract as much money as possible from the people and pass it on to the largest shareholders (the board of directors).
That is the job of the government. Everyone needs healthcare to one degree or another. If we're all going to be pooling money anyway it shouldn't be filtered through a for-profit system first.
On another note, unless an insurance is mandatory you can usually opt to pay yourself.
No I can't. Everything is too expensive because insurance being involved has inflated the costs.
The cost of insurance goes down the larger the pool of people. The largest pool in a country is everyone, so like utilities it becomes a natural monopoly.
Natural monopolies should be the purview of the government as they allow for abuse.
Anything critical to the life of an individual citizen, like health and home insurance, should be publicly run. It just doesn't make sense for a private company to manage that because their profit motive is in direct opposition to the individual (i.e. they must fight claims and inflate premiums to increase revenue).
The state loses money anyway if the person is homeless or destitute so they might as well pay out. Yes there are still agents to manage funds and adjust claims and set rates but they're now operating as impartial public servants instead of antagonists.
Sounds like communism to me, son.
Health insurance is a decent solution to no universal healthcare...on paper. But the way the US executed it is poor
Health insurance is rent on your life. Healthcare should be provided by your government through taxes. It is the best interest of everyone to do it that way. That isn’t insurance. That’s just healthcare.
Yep! Japan (only other country I have experience with) has a government run health insurance. Since the interests aren't profit, the prices remain reasonable even without it
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