I'm not from the US and I know people love to criticise the US healthcare system.
What's crazy to me about this is that the insurance doesn't work like a normal home or car insurance: your car gets destroyed, you buy another car of the same replacement value, you send the insurance company the receipt. Maybe you fight with them over the exact replacement cost, but you get pretty close.
Instead, it sounds like the insurance company provides you with an opportunity to buy medicine from them at a hopefully discounted price. Or if not technically from them - from their business partner.
Private health insurance in other parts of the world looks a bit like this with regard to hospital treatment. There's a private hospital who's partnered with the insurance company, and you can only get treated there if you have private insurance. Which makes a certain amount of sense as hospital treatment is not a commodity. But to apply the same logic to the part of the treatment that is commoditized - the drugs - is a real triumph of capitalism.
More and more it's that the insurance company lets you pay them a premium while you also pay your bills in full. Then if you hit your obscenely high deductible they start helping. Then if you hit your out of pocket maximum they cover it fully. At the end of the calendar year, everything resets, though your premium and deductible probably increased by a greater rate than your wage did.
Many drugs are not commoditized (some might be). Often you have only one or two manufacturers for some ingredient of a drug and if one of them has issues, the entire supply chain collapses.
You mean like Enron where they paid power companies to shut down to increase spot prices and manipulate markets?
Monopolization of commodity drugs and the large price increases in the US mirrors the cartel/monopoly conditions that have pervaded practically every major market in the US.
Insulin and Epipens are two common examples of this, and it has killed people. And the entire drama around Martin Shrekli.
What's crazy to me about this is that the insurance doesn't work like a normal home or car insurance: your car gets destroyed, you buy another car of the same replacement value, you send the insurance company the receipt. Maybe you fight with them over the exact replacement cost, but you get pretty close.
Instead, it sounds like the insurance company provides you with an opportunity to buy medicine from them at a hopefully discounted price. Or if not technically from them - from their business partner.
Private health insurance in other parts of the world looks a bit like this with regard to hospital treatment. There's a private hospital who's partnered with the insurance company, and you can only get treated there if you have private insurance. Which makes a certain amount of sense as hospital treatment is not a commodity. But to apply the same logic to the part of the treatment that is commoditized - the drugs - is a real triumph of capitalism.