But gp is where you do preventative care to avoid the specialists.
Your second point is right, so what are you gonna do? Make a medical system where preventative care and quality of care are valued? Then you'll get called a "communist" who wants "death camps" and get your birthplace questioned. So here we are.
In the 70s and 80s, I'm told general practitioners made more money then specialists, something I agree with. But even now, lots of people want to do general practice. The smartest person in my med school class went into pediatrics because she loved it. Money is not the biggest motivator for speciality choice, but it is one. Isn't this the case in literally every other field? Maybe SWEs who are full stack get paid more or something?
Nonsense if you read the SEC filings and compare health insurance executive compensation to other business' executives that lead similar number of employees and revenue.
Try to make sense for why people getting paid in equity would want to lower their own compensation by hiding profit. Across the entire industry, at least 7 publicly listed businesses (UNH/Elevance/CVS/Cigna/Humana/Centene/Molina). That would be a very impressive collusion scheme, if they can pull that off maybe they deserve it.
Insurance company profurs are in the 5-15% range. Drug/device can be in the 50-100% range depending on what patent monopoly they are riding.
But the health insurance companies operate regional monopolies or duopolies, which they achieve with vertical integration with hospital networks.
Health insurance knows they are riding a delicate balancing act. The entire first world besides the us has social health care. They all have better outcomes and vastly reduced costs. They are pure corruption.
So they can't show the drug device profit margins. They have to look like the hood guys who push down costs from the evil drug companies and those know it all doctors/ama.
Most importantly, though, is you would need to show what incentive an executive of a publicly listed business would have to show less profit rather than more profit (net income). Investors pay higher prices for shares of more highly profitable businesses, and executives get paid in shares.
So claiming that a publicly listed business chooses to somehow hide less net income (ignoring the claim of fraud), first you would have to provide the incentive for why executives would want to earn less.
UHC and other health insurers are swimming in money. Yet the reported profits are very low ... why?
Obamacare was ground zero for public healthcare. If it wasn't for utter slimeball Joe Lieberman doing the dirty work blocking medicare for all for the insurance companies, they would have been tossed out completely.
Again, the US is the ONLY first world economy that doesn't have social health insurance. The economics of our health care system are not sustainable, and large changes will eventually come. The health care cartel cannot show the profit margins of drug/device companies. Insurance companies are the ones that deny coverage, so they are front and center with people hating the current healthcare system.
So the healthcare companies DON'T show profit, instead they expand revenue as much as possible, and the executives funnel money to a bloated management structure. You don't need high profits to drive stock growth, you just need to get ... bigger, and that's what they do. You can do other things to boost stock price without showing profits ... use ... wait for it ... excess revenue to do stock buybacks. You can "reinvest" into expanding the vertical integration of your monopoly. You can buyout more hospital networks, effectively expanding the number of people that HAVE to use your insurance.
Let me give another example. Why are MBAs flocking to nonprofit universities? There's no stock options. There's no cashing out in mergers and acquisitions. Why?
Money floods into the universities as the endowments explode, every year the tuition increases well above inflation. Yes there is a facilities race, but why do MBAs love it? Well, it is a cushy job, universities are nice places to work. But, since there's no shareholders, no owner to show profits to, they can skim off the vast revenue increase from exploding endowments and tuition increases and... pay themselves more money.
This is false. Stock buybacks can only happen from net income, which is why health insurers don’t do them…since they have very little net income (aka profit).
> executives funnel money to a bloated management structure
You will have to provide proof that at least 7 publicly listed companies’ executives are colluding in such a manner AND their shareholders are willingly going along with employees enriching themselves at the shareholders’ expense. Lots of bold claims with no evidence, and some outright wrong ones.
>If it wasn't for utter slimeball Joe Lieberman doing the dirty work blocking medicare for all for the insurance companies, they would have been tossed out completely.
Also, there are 100 senators, and so legislation passing/not passing can never be blamed on just one. Leiberman took the public relations hit, but there were 40 other nay votes to blame also.
The specialists, the two I know probably make 700k and up, are superficially in it to "help people" but it is apparent they love the money. Radiology, Cardiology, and AssDocs.
US specialists make far too much money, especially considering that GPs barely make 100k sometimes, but for two extra years you get 6-7x the salary? Come on.
I worked at a drug/device company. It started out in a garage and was originally a "morally run company". But it had long devolved into an MBA enshittified acquisition-deal company.
I worked at a major insurance company. They can't for public reasons show TOO much of a profit, which is PERFECT for the MBAs running that company, because they hoover up all the excess in a bloated executive structure and embarrassingly huge bonuses.
Never worked for a law firm. I generally assume them to be the smallest pig, the runt, which is useful for the other pigs to bully and blame for everything.