The difference is that patients in the US are being denied by people lining their own pockets with the savings. In sane countries, there’s at least some basis of trying to do the most good with the resources at hand, which sometimes means denying care for person A because those resources would be better spent on person B. With private insurers in the US, it means denying care for person A because they think they can get away with it and it will increase their profits.

If you actually trace the cashflows, the "people lining their own pockets with the savings" are mainly not the insurers but rather the executives and shareholders for other large companies with self-funded employee health plans. Most insurance companies no longer provide much real insurance but rather primarily administer health plans on behalf of self-funded employers. Due to the minimum medical loss ratio rule, insurers actually make more profit the more claims they approve.

https://www.cms.gov/marketplace/private-health-insurance/med...

If employers wanted it, insurers would be happy to offer health plans that fully paid every claim with zero denials. This would be enormously profitable for the insurers because they could run those health plans with minimal work. But instead, most employers are constantly looking for ways to cut employee health benefit costs. This means incentives aren't aligned.

> With private insurers in the US, it means denying care for person A because they think they can get away with it and it will increase their profits.

The person at the insurer who denies a claim is not making more money because they denied it. The company as a whole might, but not the person denying it.

Right, the ones who profit are just setting up the rules, policies, and incentive structures that those people work under.

This is a really simplistic approach and you're never going to fix it.

There are numerous stakeholders who setup the rules - the government, insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, billers, etc.

All of them profit from the current system, but there is no single stakeholder who decides the overall rules.

My only point is that there are people with a lot of power to decide who gets what treatments who profit from denying treatment. That’s 100% true.

Fixing it is another matter. Of course that’s not easy.

The US spends the most budget per patient for the least amount of care, the rest goes into inefficiency and profit (a second kind of inefficiency).

Medicare per-capita spending is more than NHS per capita spending, but the NHS covers everyone.

Of course healthcare is denied in any system (in other systems this is triage), but nowhere to the level United Health does it: over 30%, it's on a completely different scale.

Your argument is completely bogus for multiple reasons. Firstly, people are paying here for insurance, a lot. Secondly, it's the FDA's job to approve treatments which it does. Thirdly, we do not have a uniform privatized determination across the country of what is approvable or not by insurance companies. They deny numerous legitimate treatments and procedures at their whim.

I’m not sure how that makes my argument bogus.

Plenty of treatments are denied in other countries. Not to mention most other countries have private insurance layered on top of public and it’s the same issue - private insurers denying a treatment through their own process.

If US insurers are guilty of murder than most of the worlds insurers are too.