$2.3 billion is nothing in a $5 trillion system. Doctors make around $500 billion in the US. Their wages are much more significant than insurance profits.
$2.3bn is profit after subtracting costs. Doctors charging time to deal with bureaucracy needed by insurance adds to the costs that are already factored into the revenue. Single payer wouldn't just eliminate the profit, but also those costs.
That's 2.3 billion in ONE QUARTER of 2025, on a revenue of 115 billion. In a quarter. There are four quarters in a year.
$5 trillion is how much is spent in all of healthcare in the USA for the whole year.
UnitedHealth's revenue was $500 billion (and net profits is 10 billion) for the year. For one insurance company. There are 6 that each have more than $80 billion per year in revenue. This isn't to mention the billing departments for each hospital, the claims processing providers smaller doctors need to enlist, the endless hours interacting with insurance companies, etc.
And tell me, please, what specific healthcare outcomes are driven by insurance companies?
Insurance companies are instrumental in ensuring that useless procedures arent performed. Over use of service is one of the biggest reasons for inflated costs in our healthcare system. Now to be clear I would prefer a medicare for all system implementing that, but under m4a doctor salaries are still a major issue that need to be addressed.
Basically all healthcare spending in the US goes through insurance companies, Im not sure why you have a problem with that. Under m4a medicare would spend trillions a year, would you be complaining about that too? Large profits would be a problem, but that doesnt exist. Our healthcare system is rotten top to bottom, insurance is part of that but imo it gets way too much blame for existing in the system the government has created.
Insurance companies basically mirror the reimbursement policies put in place by medicare. I'm sure most providers would gladly take lower reimbursement from a single provider over the chaos and pain driven by insurance companies right now.
Basically every provider does not take medicaid so I suspect you are wrong about that. Again Im not happy with the insurance situation, I just think its barely top 10 in terms of problems with our healthcare system. The bureaucracy is required because of our horrible fee for service payout system. Without getting rid of that m4a would still requires an army of billers because republicans would constantly be screaming about the government being scammed(and they wouldnt really be wrong, healthcare providers do tons of wasteful procedures and the bureaucracy is the only thing slowing that down(recent example I came across, currently we wake up obgyn's to perform emergency medically required abortion services at the hospital even though abortions can be done with a pill and the nocturnist can safely oversee the whole thing, no need to wake anyone up. This is only done so providers can charge us more money. This shit is happening constantly over and over again every time providers can find ways to nickel and dime us and patients have no choice)). We dont actually need single payer to get rid of fee for service so really I think private insurance is an orthogonal problem to the billing army.
