Concord Monitor – Opinion: Changing the conversation around insurance

Sue McKevitt lives in Bradford.

The recent killing of the medical insurance CEO (which I fully disagree with), has sparked a conversation about the role insurance companies play in our lives.

Be it homeowners, renters, auto, or health insurance, their goal is to make money. It’s also a fear-based industry. Fear is the motivator for us to purchase insurance for those “just in case” moments: house fire, car accident, emergency medical needs, etc.

It’s also an industry that tends to forget it’s in the risk business. Get into a car accident, use the product you’ve been paying for, and they raise your rates or cancel you out. How many companies are denying coverage or pulling out of states where climate disasters are occurring more frequently than the industry’s bottom line can handle?

Not everyone has or needs car, home, or renters insurance. However, the issue of health is a different story. We all need, and have a human right, to access health care, be it preventative, chronic, and everything in between.

In all the articles I have read, never is the conversation about getting rid of the middleman and instituting government-sponsored health care for all. We do it for veterans, and we do it at 80% for seniors through Medicare, and we currently do it via Medicaid for those in hard economic straits.

Seventy-four countries in the world offer universal health care for their citizens. The 43 others, including the U.S., do not. We are in the company of Nigeria, Yemen, South Africa, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. (SKUAD, 2024).

Years ago, Dennis Kucinich had a very detailed plan on how to offer direct medical care minus the insurance industry. He detailed how to save all insurance workers jobs when switching to a universal government health care system.

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Bernie Sanders and others have been pushing for universal health care for years. Obama tried by creating the Affordable Care Act, which has been and once again is under relentless attack, funded by insurance companies through lobbying efforts in Congress and contributions to elected officials.

There is no “care” in the insurance health system. Need for pre-approvals, limits on cancer care, lack of coverage for chronic illnesses, denial of coverage outright, requirements for useless tests before the needed care can be administered, coverage limits, outpriced prescriptions, becoming the “doctor” to us in spite of our own doctors recommendations, and the list goes on as many of us know and have experienced. It’s all about the money.

(Remember Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko in “Wall Street”: “Greed is good!”)

If the industry is worried you may cost too much to keep you healthy or alive, too bad. We are entering a massive time of transitions. Although the shooting was horrible, it has opened the door for this long overdue conversation.

Unfortunately, that conversation is about how to fix the insurance industry, not about how to guarantee every person in this country the basic human right to decent free medical care. We must change the conversation.