One issue is that if denying medical care is murder then every healthcare system is guilty.
In the US it’s insurance companies (or the government through Medicare or Medicaid) but in the UK it’s NICE, in Canada it’s CADTH and the provincial health authorities.
Since there are finite resources spent on healthcare, trade offs are made all the time. If spending $10M on treatment A saved 10,000 lives and $10M on treatment B saves 1,000 lives, then treatment A gets funded and treatment B doesn’t.
The difference is that patients in the US have an up close and personal experience with denial.
In Canada and the UK they don’t because doctors knows what is covered and what isn’t so never bring up life saving options if they aren’t paid for.
In rare circumstances like cystic fibrosis in the UK, patients become aware that they are being denied a life saving drug and protest, but generally it’s pretty rare because patients just don’t know the option exists.
The difference is that patients in the US are being denied by people lining their own pockets with the savings. In sane countries, there’s at least some basis of trying to do the most good with the resources at hand, which sometimes means denying care for person A because those resources would be better spent on person B. With private insurers in the US, it means denying care for person A because they think they can get away with it and it will increase their profits.
If you actually trace the cashflows, the "people lining their own pockets with the savings" are mainly not the insurers but rather the executives and shareholders for other large companies with self-funded employee health plans. Most insurance companies no longer provide much real insurance but rather primarily administer health plans on behalf of self-funded employers. Due to the minimum medical loss ratio rule, insurers actually make more profit the more claims they approve.
If employers wanted it, insurers would be happy to offer health plans that fully paid every claim with zero denials. This would be enormously profitable for the insurers because they could run those health plans with minimal work. But instead, most employers are constantly looking for ways to cut employee health benefit costs. This means incentives aren't aligned.
> With private insurers in the US, it means denying care for person A because they think they can get away with it and it will increase their profits.
The person at the insurer who denies a claim is not making more money because they denied it. The company as a whole might, but not the person denying it.
The US spends the most budget per patient for the least amount of care, the rest goes into inefficiency and profit (a second kind of inefficiency).
Medicare per-capita spending is more than NHS per capita spending, but the NHS covers everyone.
Of course healthcare is denied in any system (in other systems this is triage), but nowhere to the level United Health does it: over 30%, it's on a completely different scale.
Your argument is completely bogus for multiple reasons. Firstly, people are paying here for insurance, a lot. Secondly, it's the FDA's job to approve treatments which it does. Thirdly, we do not have a uniform privatized determination across the country of what is approvable or not by insurance companies. They deny numerous legitimate treatments and procedures at their whim.
Plenty of treatments are denied in other countries. Not to mention most other countries have private insurance layered on top of public and it’s the same issue - private insurers denying a treatment through their own process.
If US insurers are guilty of murder than most of the worlds insurers are too.
In the US it’s insurance companies (or the government through Medicare or Medicaid) but in the UK it’s NICE, in Canada it’s CADTH and the provincial health authorities.
Since there are finite resources spent on healthcare, trade offs are made all the time. If spending $10M on treatment A saved 10,000 lives and $10M on treatment B saves 1,000 lives, then treatment A gets funded and treatment B doesn’t.
The difference is that patients in the US have an up close and personal experience with denial.
In Canada and the UK they don’t because doctors knows what is covered and what isn’t so never bring up life saving options if they aren’t paid for.
In rare circumstances like cystic fibrosis in the UK, patients become aware that they are being denied a life saving drug and protest, but generally it’s pretty rare because patients just don’t know the option exists.