Andy Schoonover from ​JoinCrowdHealth.com explains that insurance costs are  inflated with bureaucratic costs like brokers’ fees, hospital fees and health plan fees that are “through the roof.” Only 8% of healthcare costs go to doctors, or about $325 billion out of the $4.5 trillion total that is spent on healthcare. 200,000 families in the US go bankrupt every year due to health expenses, even though they have health insurance! Insurance companies can almost arbitrarily deny claims and many plans have very high deductibles.  In Texas, one out of five, or 20% of claims are denied and deemed “medically unnecessary.” California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Washington, DC have compulsory health insurance, and people pay a penalty if they don’t have insurance.

Many primary care doctors hate health insurance because insurance companies will only pay a small fee for a doctor’s visit and forcing the doctor to only spend a few minutes with each patient in order to make money; the average meeting time with a doctor is 6 minutes. Some doctors are changing over to a cash only system to spend more time with a patient. Ambulatory outpatient surgery centers are also becoming popular.

Schoonover explains an alternative system that has a reduced monthly premium and funding for large bills comes from group members. He reveals how enormous hospital bills can be reduced and gave an example of how a member received a hospital bill for over $400,000 that was reduced down to $70,000.

source:How the Healthcare System Makes Trillions, and an Alternative to Commercial Insurance   (needtoknow.news)