Criticism
The United States' system of using health insurance as a means of financing health care costs has been criticized. The following are examples of such criticisms:
- Beliefs that negatives derived from inefficient negotiation with hospital systems and markets.
- Insurance companies have high administrative costs. Private health insurers are a significant portion of the U.S. economy directly employing (in 2004) almost 470,000 people at an average salary of $61,409.
- Health insurance companies are not actually providing traditional insurance, which involves the pooling of risk, because the vast majority of purchasers actually do face the harms that they are "insuring" against. Instead, as Edward Beiser and Jacob Appel have separately argued, health insurers are better thought of as low-risk money managers who pocket the interest on what are really long-term healthcare savings accounts.
- According to a study by a pro-health reform group published February 11, the nation's largest five health insurance companies posted a 56 percent gain in 2009 profits over 2008. The insurers (Wellpoint, UnitedHealth, Cigna, Aetna and Humana) cover the majority of Americans with health insurance.
Read more about this topic: Health Insurance In The United States
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)