The Entire U.S. Health Care Industry Has Become One Giant Money Making Scam
 

The following are 25 shocking facts that prove that the entire U.S. health care industry is one giant money making scam....

#1 The chairman of Aetna, the third largest health insurance company in the United States, brought in a staggering $68.7 million during 2010. Ron Williams exercised stock options that were worth approximately $50.3 million and he raked in an additional $18.4 million in wages and other forms of compensation. The funny thing is that he left the company and didn't even work the whole year.
#2 The top executives at the five largest for-profit health insurance companies in the United States combined to receive nearly $200 million in total compensation in 2009.
#3 One study found that approximately 41 percent of working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.
#4 Over the last decade, the number of Americans without health insurance has risen from about 38 million to about 52 million.
#5 According to one survey, approximately 1 out of every 4 Californians under the age of 65 has absolutely no health insurance.
#6 According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that actually did have health insurance.
#7 Profits at U.S. health insurance companies increased by 56 percent during 2009.
#8 According to a report by Health Care for America Now, America's five biggest for-profit health insurance companies ended 2009 with a combined profit of $12.2 billion.
#9 Health insurance rate increases are getting out of control. According to the Los Angeles Times, Blue Shield of California plans to raise rates an average of 30% to 35%, and some individual policy holders could see their health insurance premiums rise by a whopping 59 percent this year alone.
#10 According to an article on the Mother Jones website, health insurance premiums for small employers in the U.S. increased 180% between 1999 and 2009.
#11 Why are c-sections on the rise? It is because a vaginal delivery costs approximately $5,992 on average, while a c-section costs approximately $8,558 on average.
#12 Since 2003, health insurance companies have shelled out more than $42 million in state-level campaign contributions.
#13 Between 2000 and 2006, wages in the United States increased by 3.8%, but health care premiums increased by 87%.
#14 There were more than two dozen pharmaceutical companies that made over a billion dollars in profits in 2008.
#15 Each year, tens of billions of dollars is spent on pharmaceutical marketing in the United States alone.
#16 Nearly half of all Americans now use prescription drugs on a regular basis according to a CDC report that was just released. According to the report, approximately one-third of all Americans use two or more pharmaceutical drugs, and more than ten percent of all Americans use five or more prescription drugs on a regular basis.
#17 According to the CDC, approximately three quarters of a million people a year are rushed to emergency rooms in the United States because of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs.
#18 The Food and Drug Administration reported 1,742 prescription drug recalls in 2009, which was a gigantic increase from 426 drug recalls in 2008.
#19 Lawyers are certainly doing their part to contribute to soaring health care costs. According to one recent study, the medical liability system in the United States added approximately $55.6 billion to the cost of health care in 2008.
#20 According to one doctor interviewed by Fox News, "a gunshot wound to the head, chest or abdomen" will cost $13,000 at his hospital the moment the victim comes in the door, and then there will be significant additional charges depending on how bad the wound is.
#21 In America today, if you have an illness that requires intensive care for an extended period of time, it is ridiculously really easy to rack up medical bills that total over 1 million dollars.
#22 It is estimated that hospitals overcharge Americans by about 10 billion dollars every single year.
#23 One trained medical billing advocate says that over 90 percent of the medical bills that she has audited contain "gross overcharges".
#24 It is not uncommon for insurance companies to get hospitals to knock their bills down by up to 95 percent, but if you are uninsured or you don't know how the system works then you are out of luck.
#25 According to one recent report, Americans spend approximately twice as much as residents of other developed countries on health care.


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...because the doc doesn't want to miss his golf appointment.

Selling popcorn now.

Huh...

People using an industry as a way to make money.

Who'd have ever thought?

the business of somebody's health should never be for profit.

Nothing will change, however because the healthcare companies are probably paying off the government to stop anything that might threaten their profit margin.

Oh yeah and the "Capitalism or Death" group.

reminds me of this:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19072...movies_p2.html

(scroll down the page a bit)

Health care reform? OMG SOCIALISM!!11ONE11!!!!

Yes and no.
Moreso no.
Research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies—dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits.
The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D.
The great majority of “new” drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market.
the industry is hardly a model of American free enterprise.
It is utterly dependent on government-granted monopolies—in the form of patents and Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved exclusive marketing rights. If it is not particularly innovative in discovering new drugs, it is highly innovative—and aggressive—in dreaming up ways to extend its monopoly rights.

Market left to itself. What do you expect?

You can trust that politicians mess up things. You can also trust that private business will suck from common interest like vampyres suck blood.

Both are like a rock and a hard place. And ordinary people sit right between them.

The German health care standard is not worse than the American. But our -often criticised as "socialist" - system costs us much less per head, than the american systems costs the American citizen. And thisalthough nowhere else inEurope drugs cost as much as in Germany, and by european standards I think the German spendings per head also make it a costly system to run, with galloping rises - which all flow into the pockets of that wonderful private business. We too get sucked out. The profits dissappear in private pockets.

At the same time, both strong lobbies and powerinterests bypolitical parties make sure that the political system is both unable and unwilling to tackle the profiteers.

Like democracy, marketeconomy only works on size levels not too big, making it less prone to corruption and egoism being put above communal interest. Make a market too complex, make a communal system too big, and see both derail and getting corrupted.

And no, it'S not that you can just get rid of it by having an election and voting somebody out of office and somebody else in. Both are products of the system's rules - so what do you expect of them?. ;)

Chnage cannot be reached from inside such system, for that the profiteers are too powerful and have tailoired the rules of operation too much to their benefits and interests as if they need to just sit still when you tackle thesde interests. You need to tackle our crusted systems from outside, and bring their established structures of interests and personnel to fall.

But that does not chnage the fact that there are too many people on this globe, too big communities by that - and thus you cannot avoid that whatever you coinstruct to replace the current bad system - it will get corrupted and distorted again in the way the old one was.

I have come to the disillusioned conclusion that there is neither rescue for us nor a better world in the future - with so many billion people running around.

We are waaayyyyyy too many, both on a planetarian level, and on level of national communities in the developed world.

This is why i'm for a national health care system. The government may be inefficient and stupid but they at least aren't deliberately trying to clean me out.

It's like the choice between leaches and army ants.

I'll add this, for the sake of interest:

My mother died at 1640 Eastern Time on 17 Nov, 2010.

She was admitted to the hospital at ~1400 on 15 Nov, 2010.

The insurance company was billed ~$84,000 for those ~48 hours. For a patient who died.

In comparison: while she was being treated (chemotherapy, radiation) for her leukemia earlier in that year, she was in the hospital for approximately seven days. Each visit was billed out at ~200,000.

She was taking a prescription medication that - I'm totally not kidding here - cost ~$20,000 for a ninety day supply.

Immediately following her death, I "impounded" all of her medication to prevent my stepfather, who suffers late-stage Alzheimer's, from accidentally ingesting - or worse, giving out - those prescriptions. After reviewing what I had in the grocery bags before turning the prescriptions in for destruction, I had roughly $120,000 worth in prescriptions, according to the values assigned by the insurance companies.

All of that, for a patient who didn't survive nine months with leukemia.

You don't live in the US?

What's sad with big pharm the big boys now use marketing firms to decide what medicines they should develop, not chemist or lab techs. Studies show marketers are in charge of over 70% of new drugs that come out.

The goal is to get people on meds that aren't really sick, you see the commercials, all the meds you need for depression, mild pain, birth control,
sexual dysfunction, etc..

The bigger fear is that most drugs made, the goal is to get you on them and keep you on them. Really no different than nicotine in cigarettes. Big pharma wants americans addicted.

I even tire when I visit my GP, more dang pharma reps than patients sometimes. Sadly, it seems
Doctor's like giving out this crap like candy.

Like I said inefficient versus predatory, leaches or army ants.

My cardiologist and my GP order the same blood tests. The lab takes one set of blood samples and charges me twice because they had to send the results to two places instead of one. A stamp and a photocopy ends up costing me $50 bucks. I could go on but it just gets my blood pressure up.

Being an army brat I grew up with government health care. I experienced more of it during my own military service. Since then I have had private insurance though my various employers, so I am very familiar with both types of health care systems and I have to say I believe national health care would be a better system for most people.

Here's where part of the problem lies: the regulatory authorities are far less stringent than they once were; new drugs are approved almost before trials anymore. Meanwhile, doctors are having to pay far much more for litigation-proofing (malpractice insurance), meaning they're blasting patients through with cursory examinations before writing a script for the newest drug to cure whatever ails the patient.

I've got about 1200 bucks in dental work coming up, because I've not been to a dentist in a long time. I still have all my teeth (except wisdom teeth), and am not about to lose any of them; I've been fortunate in my dental situation. Insurance wouldn't cover this, even if I had it, because I hadn't done the proper maintenance care.

Read many dental plans - anything more than routine cleanings usually isn't covered; what's the point in even having it? Insurance companies write so many "easy-out" clauses into their contracts that pulling a splinter turns into a major production.

I'm jaded as hell about it all - dealing with mom's illness and death, and my own struggles with insurance companies following a work-related accident in 07 have left me a little tired of all of 'em.

What scares me is the GOP wouldn't even be talking health care if not for the fact the Dems push it...they never have. Sadly, the GOP has sold out lock, stock and barrel to the many special interest in health care. It's like they put their seats up for auction for bid to the biggest corporations.

If I had a choice of care controlled by corporations or government, both are bad, but I would choose government over corporations. In the end it appears corporations will win..

Assuming that the politicians are in the pockets of the big medical, insurance corps and drug companies and it sure lookes like they are, and the politicians will be the ones to implement and oversee either a government single payer system or some other health care reform, what makes you think the new system will be any different than the old one. The big health care corps will still make huge money and the people will take in in the shorts same as now.
SOSDS. Same Old Sh** Different System.

Health care is a great big cash cow and it's product, your health, is a very vital necessity. If you're sick or in pain you'll pay whatever you can to feel better, even more if it's a loved one.

Health care is just to big to fail (to produce big profits)
The "powers that be" will spend any amount of money to protect those profits. So it will be SOSDS.

Universal single payer system will give more people coverage at greater expense and a lower level of care for everybody, probability bankrupt the country. The big corps will still be making a ton of money, if you don't think so I think you may not understand the power of money.

Reforming the current system will give good coverage to most and some will not have coverage at all. Unless the reforms are drastic this will also bankrupt the country. I can see no circumstances where drastic reform will ever happen. Hell they can't even cut a few billion from an overly inflated fiscal budget.

"Leaches or army ants", to barrow a phrase.
What Armisead said about the drug companies is too true.

I have a mild skin condition and have been using an ointment for years, cost about a hundred dollars years ago, but with the advent of drug advertising and the Prescription Drug Coverage the cost has risen to over four hundred dollars for the same thing.
With Medicare Prescription Drug Coverage I still pay about one hundred dollars and somebody is making off with the other three hundred.

Unless the politicians grow a big pair of brass ones I don't see any hope this mess will ever get fixed. Some very drastic reform is needed and I just don't see that happening. I'm repeating myself here aren't I. Well I guess it's true.

SOSDS. :damn:

Magic

Hello
i think the situation in Germany is heading for the same cost explosion you see in the US.
The "problem" or better PITA is that there are so much lobbyists and interest groups and politicians listening to, and being outright bribed, by them.
In Germany, (not only) medical companies write new laws and "propose" them to politicians and surveying organisations, to sign and accept them. If the latter do not, they may face financial problems in their next election campaign, or receive some pressure from sides they never thought of.

Medical companies are not bad in itself, they have just adapted to locust-capitalism, and let students and doctors do the research, "generously" paying for the study including, say, 100 probands, and declare the result to be statistically significant - and if it does not fit they just let someone else do the same test study again.
They do not want you to become sick or harass you, they just do not care at all - or better, only about money. You will certainly never hear that, from them.

What i do not understand in the US is, that they are completely against any control of pharmaceutical companies, because they always proclaim this would be "socialism" or "communism". Why do you always whine, and blame the government, and only the government ?!
For the same reason they do not want governmental interference, ok. But they also complain about high prices of drugs and medical treatment ? What ?
Do they really believe pharma companies will lower their prices or services to a still high, but more common sense level, voluntarily, without direct hard pressure ?

This will end in medical treatment for those who can afford it, but not because the treatment itself would be worth it (it could be much cheaper and the companies would still make billions of money), but because they do not care about common sense and - even a paid-for - welfare for all, because they do not care, they give a damn, because the stock holders are coming first, always. And certainly also because pharmacy managers want to get rich within their limited lifetime. There is no master plan thinking of decades into the future. Instant cash is it. Also anyone who has a bit money lets the banks - without even knowing it - invest it in fonds and stocks, which directly support this mechanism.

There are some branches in industry that may never have been privatized, simple as that. Especially, when those industries have been initially financed by tax payers, not the private companies which own it today. Losses are being socialized, wins are being privatized.
This whole system itself is foul and rotten to the bones.

Greetings,
Catfish

The United States of One Giant Ponzi Scheme.

The McCarran Ferguson act, passed in 1945, exempts the insurance industry from many parts of antitrust law. That means collusion, price fixing, cartels...all legal! All A-OK! It was supposed to be temporary. 66 years later, we're still waiting.

Free market my butt.