this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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When they phrase it that way the insurance companies actually look better than they're commonly marked for. If I'm putting the right number of 0s in a calculator that's a profit rate of 4.12% which is a heck of a lot less than places like the retailers where they can afford to have a half off sale.
What we could really use is breakout of the 'above bottom line' expenditures to see who takes what from each $ put in.
The metric you need is what percent of revenue was used to pay doctors and hostpitals vs how much was wasted on “buisiness expenses”
Profit is just the leftovers that they couldnt figure out how to spend before tax time
Pretty well what I said with regards to the above bottom line. I know someone has put out some nice pie chart at some point to say what % of your premium dollar goes to what, will have to try and track one down.
Several years ago, a BadgerCare (the State of Wisconsin's Medicaid program) administrator told me once that the program has less than 3% administrative overhead. That means that out of every dollar spent on the program, $0.97 goes to pay for Wisconsin residents' medical care. He said that private insurance companies have something closer to 30% administrative overhead. I have no idea what it is now.
Profit is what remains after paying your executives large sums of money.
Profit is a useless measure in most respects. The money they spend on executive compensation and stock buybacks isn’t part of the profits. The money they funnel to their fake charities and non profits isn’t part of the profits. The money they give to politicians and high priced consultant friends is not part of the profits. Profit is really just what’s left over after quite of few people have already profited quite a bit.
It also shows how convoluted and busy work the system is, how many utterly pointless jobs involved.
Retail stores don't kill people by raising the price of some shirt...