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:
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
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—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)