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

[Feuer Frei!]

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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[nikimcbee]

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.

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

Selling popcorn now.

[razark]

Huh...

People using an industry as a way to make money.

Who'd have ever thought?

[gimpy117]

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

Originally Posted by gimpy117

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.

[the_tyrant]

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

(scroll down the page a bit)

[Ducimus]

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

[Feuer Frei!]

Originally Posted by the_tyrant

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

(scroll down the page a bit)

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.

[Skybird]

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.