The system, they’ll tell us, is full of moving parts and competing interests, and confusion is just the natural residue of a system that size. They’re not entirely wrong. But the underlying mechanism is that the confusion we see is manufactured.
Every hour we spend on hold, every denied claim we have to appeal, it all serves a purpose. Confusion keeps us powerless and unable to act. That frustration wears us down and keeps us paying.
Our money goes back into the broken system that's keeping us poor and sick. I know it sounds cynical, and I’m not saying there is a room full of executives deciding which patients live or die. The problem is more ordinary, and therefore more difficult to fix.
We built a system around financial incentives, gave those incentives enormous power, and then acted surprised when they began dictating how healthcare works. We like to imagine health insurance as a safety net. We pay into it while we are healthy, expecting it to catch us when we are sick.
But unfortunately, far too many of us have experienced the truth. The American healthcare and insurance system we have today is, at its core, a business. Its responsibility is to manage risk, control expenditure and generate returns.
Our responsibility, as the patient, is somehow to navigate the machinery while we’re sick, frightened, exhausted, or sitting beside a sick child. The system does not need bad people to produce bad outcomes. It only needs misaligned incentives.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
