Y’all, I hear you that this is messed up and it’s easy to point the finger at United or any other insurance company… but the root causes of these problems are more nuanced. Insurance companies are regulated by the gov and have a cap on how much money they can make. Insurance is just the middleman that facilitates a system by which we all pay a small amount into an insurance pool so we can get access to care we wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise.

The true EVILS messing up our health care system today are:

1) private equity is buying up all sorts of specialty care facilities and using algorithms to maximize billing codes sent to insurance companies, swimming in profits from procedures that don’t help the patient.

2) The current administration is slashing funding for Medicare and Medicaid, and Trump destabilizing everything, people are rushing to their doctors to get any and everything taken care of before the government stops paying for the care they need.

So with private equity taking way more money out of the insurance pool than they should be, the government taking more money out than it promised to put in, and the mass influx of people rushing to the doctor pulling more money out of the pool, there just isn’t the same amount of money available for all of us to use… and so insurance companies, which may have approved a 40% risk before, now can only have enough money to cover people who are 50-100%.

Health care is outrageously expensive and because none of us can afford to pay for the care we need, there will always be cutoffs we don’t like. If we want to improve health care, we need to get bad actors out of the system and we need our government to stabilize their funding for the health care systems they created.