Networks are very important with all kinds of insurance. The thing you notice when you switch from employer-covered insurance to ACA market insurance is all the fiddly choices your employer was making for you. You can say that having to make these choices is a process failure of the ACA, or you can say that having the freedom to make those choices yourself is a benefit of the ACA.
I'm not sure what M4A has to do with this, and, in particular, to relate this story back to the thread, you should be aware that Medicare drug benefit administration is also privatized, and that somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of Medicare recipients also get Medicare Advantage, a private insurance rider to Medicare that is largely defined by network restrictions.
Could you formulate a response like this that addresses the point I just made, which is that Medicare also includes, for a huge chunk of its recipients, network restrictions, and for all its prescription drug recipients private insurance?
For now it does. That will not always be the case, or should it be, the regulatory picture will appear very different than it does today.
Those things simply do not add value. They do help to make more money.
When health care is about making money, it is not about making people healthy. And it is not about cost either.
Very large numbers of Americans are both impacted in a negative way, and long past the idea of private insurers being good primary care vehicles. They aren't.
Private insurers should be forced out of primary care. If I had my way, doing that would be illegal.
There is a basic conflict of interest between an insurer making money and what is best for sick people.
I will tell you personally, the hell I have gone through, family members dead, others living with pain, financial damage, homes lost, I am very highly motivated to do all I can to see an end to our current, increasingly cruel and ineffective system. Talk about death panels. Yeah, happened to us. Unnecessary that it did too.