Healthcare for profit is one of the things I utterly loathe about the United States.
Folks who enjoy some sort of socialized medicine? Don't move here. Not because most of us wouldn't welcome you, but because this nation is fucking inhumane.
We love bragging about how we have some of the best health care & providers in the world, & we do - we're not the only ones, but yeah we do - & we mostly ignore the fact that there's an abyssal gulf between said top-notch healthcare & the ability for most of us to *access* it without going bankrupt.
I work in a large teaching hospital affiliated with a big fat public research university with a solid medical school. I love my job & I love what I do, I love the school & the hospital & the folks I work with, & I get to see at least some of the inner workings of how all this shit goes down.
Frankly, the dept. that deals with insurance companies is full of steel-boned saints. I don't know how they put up with the bullshit.
The hospitals in the uni system here are all NPOs, so there's no profit in the sense of having shareholders & stock & that sort of thing. There's just revenue, & then that gets folded back into the hospital in a bunch of ways.
FYI, we get about half of our revenue from Medicaid patients.
That's not uncommon at all, throughout the US healthcare industry.
@Impious_Jade I have really good health insurance from the marketplace cuz of the weirdness I have. My insurance app keeps track of how much I've spent all year including on meds and its a healthy $7000 right now and I still got surgery to go in just over a month. That price includes the visits for counseling and psych care thanks to trauma from family cuz insurance doesn't like to pay for mental health care
@insomniacviolin Ugh I hear you about mental health care. I've pretty much given up on finding a therapist despite needing one. I can't afford it even with the policy I have, which is way better than most.
@Impious_Jade it's terrible trying to get one unless you have a medicaid policy then boom...covered.