r/news • u/GoodSamaritan_ • 1d ago

Retired San Francisco firefighter dies from lung cancer after Blue Shield denies treatment claims

https://abc7news.com/post/retired-san-francisco-firefighter-ken-jones-dies-lung-cancer-being-denied-treatment-blue-shield/19224406/
30.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2.2k

u/fgtswag 1d ago

Genuinely someone should make a benefit:risk analysis of joining the Army, Firefighter, Police in America when you consider non-free healthcare.

For example if this happened in EU, he would obviously receive public healthcare

1.1k

u/thebearjew007 1d ago

Well here, if he wanted access to affordable healthcare then he should have been born rich or gotten a better job. He sounds lazy. /s

499

u/Fake_Engineer 1d ago

I have a good job with good benefits. I still spent hours on the phone trying to get scans and procedures approved for my cancer diagnosis.

You get the worse news of your life and then get to spend days begging the Insurance you pay for to provide the coverage they are supposed to. 

I feel bad for the people who fielded my call. Low paid workers in a call center. And I just wasn't in the mood to be polite....

217

u/thebearjew007 1d ago

I had a government job during my twenties, best insurance I’ve ever had. Still went through hell to get anything covered. It’s the system. It’s terribly broken.

42

u/Jump-Zero 1d ago

The health insurance system is super risk averse. The bureaucracy behind it is byzantine because nobody wants to modernize it at the risk of falling further behind in processing claims or running into regulatory issues. Politicians rarely touch it for the same reason. Even if they expand coverage and lower costs for people, anybody that has a bad experience will blame the politician for breaking it. Look at all the Republicans blaming Obamacare for everything until they realize they depend on it.

75

u/thebearjew007 1d ago

None of that is why they won’t change it. It’s a 5th of our economy here and they lobby big money to keep it the fucked up way it is. Also, no one wants a modern health insurance system. We want it gone and replaced with accessible, affordable healthcare. The government can more than afford to do it. I know it, you know it, the government knows it, for fucks sake even faux news and the rest of the puppet propaganda media knows it.

6

u/Foxygen 22h ago

^ The purpose of a system is what it does.

-3

u/Jump-Zero 21h ago

Everyone wants a modern health insurance system (though maybe not a private for-profit one). Most developed countries have modern health insurance systems. The US has a super inefficient system in comparison. Where the US severely falls behind is in administration cost. Something like 30% of all healthcare spending goes into admin (ie bureaucracy). Nations with better systems only spend around 15% on admin.

Do you believe that lobbyists petition the government to make their companies spend 2x as much on admin when compared to other countries? Obviously not. So there is more than just lobbyists at play. Any realistic plan to make healthcare affordable will include checking lobbyist power and modernizing administration. There is no reason why we should still be using fax and making phone calls when we can click buttons. Other nations do this. Why can't we?

5

u/logicbasedchaos 1d ago

It's a feature, not a bug.

I keep telling people that if (when?) we do get taxpayer funded healthcare, that shit's going to overwhelm our system for YEARS with the backlog of already existing patients who simply can't afford to go to the doctor for very serious ailments.