The lies that the ”Medicare for All” crowd tell about Private Insurance

In a previous podcast, I talked about the four hard healthcare questions that we avoid. In this podcast I am going to talk about private insurance, and specifically how the Medicare for All crowd comes close to telling bald-faced lies about private insurance to justify the need for Medicare for All.

So here are the four big lies or misstatements about private health insurance:
1. That insurance companies are driving up healthcare costs
2. That health insurers have excessive, unnecessary bureaucracy that helps drive up costs
3. That health insurers deny claims to protect their profits
4. That it’s the insurance company’s money

None of these statements are true. I understand that insurance companies make an easy target to blame for costs and lack of coverage. But the insurance companies are the least responsible for the significant increase in the cost of care over the past four decades. Instead the increase primarily comes down to two factors: technology and utilization. The hardest truth in healthcare is that we can’t afford to spend an unlimited amount of money to save any one person. We just can’t. At some point, we have to stop paying the healthcare costs to keep a person alive.

No amount of fantasizing or demonizing insurance companies is going to change this. And until we stop demonizing insurance companies, we aren’t going to have the conversation on healthcare that we need.