Patients, advocates and researchers welcome regulations but argue rules don’t go nearly far enough to tackle scale of problem
A new set of rules from the Biden administration seeks to rein in private health insurance companies’ use of prior authorization – a byzantine practice that requires people to seek insurance company permission before obtaining medication or having a procedure.
The cost-containment strategy often delays care and forces patients, or their doctors, to navigate opaque and labyrinthine appeals.
The administration’s newly finalized rules will require insurance companies who work in federal programs to speed up the approval process and make decisions within 72 hours for urgent requests. The regulations will also require companies to give a specific reason as to why a request was denied and publicly report denial metrics. The regulations will primarily go into effect in 2026.
We’re gonna go ahead and adopt universal healthcare now, and offer free guillotinings for anyone who has a problem with that. All this “private health insurance” crap is a scam.
Employer-sponsored healthcare? That’s not a benefit. That’s extortion. It’s pre-emptive retribution for refusing to be exploited. It’s also a scam: as soon as you’re sick enough that you can’t work, and actually need it, you lose your coverage.
Obamacare props up this broken system. It drives people opposed to private insurance and employer-sponsored coverage to earn less, becoming less productive, so as to qualify for the tax credits and remain covered. The only redeeming quality of Obamacare is that in propping up private insurance, the industry becomes reliant on it, and will collapse entirely when we eventually shut it down.
Fuck privatized healthcare coverage.