Thank you for posting this. This is both staggering, and also highly informative. It's clear this is crushing the US middle and lower classes.
I've seen a recent trend in churches, where they use their excess funds to buy people's medical debt out of collections and forgive it. It's the best thing I've heard in a long time.
I also have been recently battling with Blue Shield of California (but they're all bad). They were denying me my medicine, in a similar way that Cigna was proven to deny claims by ProPublica recently. I also found out that a few years ago Blue Shield of California was stripped of its non profit tax benefits because it had billions in surplus that it was just sitting on, you know, making profit. Since then they seem to be spending money to out their names on things like opera houses in SF and advertising, but not putting it to work in the community to make real impact.
I propose we create a movement that demands that insurance companies use their excess profit, etc. to buy people's medical debt and free them of it. How do we get this movement going? Blue Shield of California alone has hundreds of millions a year in surplus, that would buy out billions of dollars in medical debt for people and completely change many people's lives for the better.
> I propose we create a movement that demands that insurance companies use their excess profit, etc. to buy people's medical debt and free them of it. How do we get this movement going? Blue Shield of California alone has hundreds of millions a year in surplus, that would buy out billions of dollars in medical debt for people and completely change many people's lives for the better.
Blue Shield of California had a net loss of almost a billion dollars in 2022[0]. Should they do the reverse in that case and put their excess loss by putting more people in medical debt?
No, they should do a bunch of internal audits and clean house and go bankrupt if that's what's in the cards. Mismanagement has consequences.
As you pointed out, they are being run very poorly, while the top executives still take home million dollar salaries (1) and have been spending money on things like the Blue Shield Field Club at Oracle park.
If they do the work, I'm sure they can do right by the general public and their customers, they are currently not. They have a 1.1 star review with 800 reviews on Yelp, it's lower than the San Francisco DMV which has 1.8.
Surveys of people "considering" or "planning" to do things are notoriously inaccurate. You have to look at the number of people who actually did do the thing in question.
Your source shows ~375k to 2m non-business bankruptcies filed per year over the last twenty years, not all of which is primarily due to medical costs (but there appears to not be a definitive source of data on this), out of a population that went from 282m to 331m over the same time. So 0.1-0.7% of the population files for a personal bankruptcy every year for any reason, which is a far cry from one quarter of the country being on a brink of a medical bankruptcy.
Everyone knows healthcare costs are problematic in this country; no need to resort to hyperbole. Let's stick to the facts.
It's reality, not FUD. Emergency rooms not being able to turn you away when you have a heart attack isn't healthcare. Healthcare includes being able to go to a doctor before you get to the point of emergency for preventative care.
Healthcare should also include taking care of yourself, but somehow we've gotten to the place where only a quarter of the population is at a healthy weight.
https://www.debt.org/bankruptcy/statistics/