Ivory Tower is not Bulletproof
A dead CEO, a disgruntled customer, likely a dead patient and a broken healthcare system
Say the courts systems were privatized and run for profit. What would you suppose would happen?
Courts need cases. Say, keeping the case going generated revenues.
Then courts would be selling gold membership for attorneys who file 10 or more cases in a month. Attorneys would be trying to convince people to file cases where none exist. Further, there would be an attempt to keep cases going indefinitely in court and nothing resembling justice would ever be delivered.
Thankfully, this is not the case.
Courts are not run for profit.
There are things in society that should not be for-profit. Education and healthcare are amongst those. The for-profit nature of education cloaked in trusts and societies that are “in principle” non-profits have resulted in price inflation that is crazy. So much so that today, a kindergarten education in India costs as much as I paid for my engineering 20 years ago.
Similarly, I am no longer comfortable visiting any doctor. I do not know if they are diagnosing me right, or prescribing medicines to meet the sales target set by some Pharma company. When you start to view subject-matter experts as mere salespeople, out to make a buck, you no longer want their expertise.
Henry VIII wanted a male heir and asked the pope to annul his marriage with Catherine of Aragon in 1527. The Pope was getting quite a bit of money from the Spaniards and refused to annul the marriage. To overcome this problem, he created the Church of England. This Church over the course of the next few decades underwent “reformation” and became Protestant.
Thanks to the narcissism of small difference, the kind America is experiencing today, the following century was beset with wars fought between the Catholics and the Protestants. Incidentally, these wars were the reason the people from the Island a.k.a. England, got aboard the Mayflower to America.
By the 1700s, there was the Jacobite Rebellion. The Catholics were still fighting the Protestants. While nobody cared for the widows of these wars, a couple of Scots were considering the fate of widows of clergymen.
“Robert Wallace was a hard drinker as well as a mathematical prodigy, who loved to knock back claret with his bibulous buddies at the Rankenian Club, which met in what used to be Ranken’s Inn.ag Alexander Webster’s nickname was Bonum Magnum; it was said to be ‘hardly in the power of liquor to affect Dr Webster’s understanding or his limbs’. Yet no one was more sober when it came to calculations of life expectancy. The plan Webster and Wallace came up with was ingenious, reflecting the fact that they were as much products of Scotland’s eighteenth-century Enlightenment as of the Calvinist Reformation that had preceded it. Rather than merely having ministers pay an annual premium, which could be used to take care of widows and orphans as and when ministers died, they argued that the premiums should be used to create a fund that could then be profitably invested. Widows and orphans would be paid out of the returns on the investment, not just the premiums themselves. ”
Excerpt From
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Niall Ferguson
Actuarial Sciences were invented! They calculated the exact amount every minister had to pay as premium. The Scottish Minister’s Widow’s Fund was the first life insurance scheme in the world. It was run as a not-for-profit.
The fund morphed into what is today known as Scottish Widows, which is owned by the Lloyd’s Banking group today.
Insurance is not a business to profit from. You would be hard-pressed to find a not-for-profit insurance company today.
When forced to sell insurance, you are only selling fear coupled with a promise. But when you renege on that promise, things can go awry.
Last week, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare Brian Thompson was gunned down in New York. A manhunt is on for the killer.
The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were found emblazoned on the ammunition, echoing a phrase used by insurance industry critics, two law enforcement officials said Thursday.
The words were written in permanent marker, according to one of the two officials, who were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
Source: AP News
There are a few things that you need to understand about insurance first. Millionaires and Billionaires do not go and get insurance, poor people do. Who would worry about protecting themselves from an unforeseen bill that could disrupt the house budget.
As Scott Galloway writes -
Seven years ago, I canceled all my insurance coverage — health, life, property, flood, etc. I don’t own a car, but when I did, we purchased the minimum amount required by law. This is a position of privilege (don’t cancel your health insurance), as there is no disease or property loss that would cause me financial strain. Since adopting this strategy, I’ve saved $1.4 million in premiums.
Source: No Mercy, No Malice
Insurance companies want to deliver the highest profits for their shareholders. That is not possible if they were to clear every single claim that comes their way. Sure, some of them could be an attempt at fraud, but the insurance business in and of itself is a fraud. Their strategy very simply explained by the words on the bullet.
At the same time, posts on social media have been claiming that UnitedHealthcare’s claim denial rate is the highest in the industry at 32%. This figure comes from the personal finance website Value Penguin, which said it calculated that rate from available in-network data from plans sold on the marketplace.
Source: Quartz
In the US, if you do not have insurance, and you happened to fall sick, your choice is between dying due to absence of medical care or dying trying to clear the medical debt.
On UnitedHealth Group’s Facebook post, which announced Thompson’s untimely death, more than 37,000 people posted a laughing emoji, while one commenter wrote, “I would offer thoughts and prayers but they are not covered as they are out of network.” (The comments for that post have since been turned off.) Another commenter on X wrote, “As someone covered under UnitedHealthcare, i can completely understand the actions taken.”
This lack of empathy for Thompson, and overall anger toward the healthcare system, can be seen as a measure of many Americans’ distrust of healthcare insurance companies and frustration over increasingly high costs for monthly premiums, co-pays, and access to specialists, as well as a growing list of doctor visits and tests that are not covered by insurance.
“When you shoot one man in the street it’s murder. When you kill thousands of people in hospitals by taking away their ability to get treatment, you’re an entrepreneur,” a user posted on X. Meanwhile, on Bluesky, one user joked: “My copay for thoughts and prayers is $100,000; I heard his condition was pre-existing; My ability to care was denied; My sympathy requires a referral; Submitted claim for condolences was denied.”
Source: Fast Company
No other country epitomizes, the use of healthcare to meet rapacious needs of capitalists, as much as the US does.
When you turn services that should be offered as social goods into profit seeking machines, you engage in social harm. There is a need to reconsider what should be allowed in the realms of profitable activity and what should not be.
I am told in my school days the difference between physical and chemical reactions. I gather that chemical reactions are irreversible. Somethings were mixed and it became insurance. And education and healthcare. I also heard of privatisation of Prisons in USA. Check the conviction rates like the prescriptions by doctors there to meet the targets of pharma companies.