Private health insurance in the U.S. is both highly regulated and heavily subsidized.
................. employment-based health insurance, which covers 161 million Americans, is far more of a government creation than most people realize. For employment-based insurance exists largely because of huge implicit government subsidies that come with major strings attached. .............. If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance. ................... employment-based health plans can’t discriminate based on medical history — that is, they can’t deny coverage to employees with pre-existing conditions — and they also can’t offer the plans only to highly compensated employees — a health plan that is only for the C-suite is considered taxable income. ................. So given the restrictions of the federal tax code, employer-based health insurance is a lot like Obamacare, which also prohibits discrimination based on medical history and provides subsidies to make insurance affordable to lower-paid workers. The fact is that virtually all of private healthcare insurance is already well under some form of government control through regulation and tax subsidies. .............. is Medicare socialist? Don’t tell anyone, but the way Medicare operates — it covers every senior’s medical expenses, whatever they turn out to be, while being funded by taxes that depend on one’s income — could be summarized by the old Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And back in 1961, when Ronald Reagan was the face of a last-ditch effort by the American Medical Association to block the creation of Medicare, he denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine” and warned that it would destroy our freedom. .................... In reality, American freedom survived until Jan. 20, 2025, while Medicare is immensely popular, with an 82 percent favorable rating in the most recent KFF survey. Medicaid, government health insurance for lower-income Americans, comes in at 73 percent. This is in sharp contrast to public views about private insurers, who are widely disliked if not hated and accused of denying essential care. ............ The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare. .............. private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients. ..............What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites.
...................... Americans are fed up with a system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. .............. El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time.
This is a miracle.
— Damon Zumbroegel (@DamonZumbroegel) August 10, 2026
Rainbow between Nilgiri and Dhaulagiri in the Kali Gandaki valley. The Himalayas at their finest. The sights, the sounds, the feeling of being alive. #himalayas #travel #Nepal pic.twitter.com/bgP2SRix3g
My “standard” chick.
— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) August 11, 2026
How did I talk her into hanging out 25 years?
I have no idea but am quite blessed.
She refused to use @tesla FSD in its early years.
And hated the Toyota before that.
I am more Mad Max than standard. :-) pic.twitter.com/oc96KjpsT7
The Rise of the Measles-Industrial Complex Why MAGA wants children to get sick and die ......... On Monday Donald Trump issued an executive order that, if implemented, would substantially reduce the number of vaccines American children receive and, in practice, how many of them are vaccinated at all. While it’s not clear whether Trump’s order has any legal force, it will reinforce public skepticism of and hostility to vaccines, which has led to declining vaccination rates. This decline has in turn led to a surge in infectious diseases that had previously been virtually eradicated, notably measles. As the chart below shows, cumulative cases in the first 30 weeks of this year already exceeded the total for last year, which itself was the worst measles year since 1991 ............ Trump justified his anti-vax decree by pointing to an alleged link between vaccines and autism. Yet dozens of careful scientific studies have failed to find any such link.
............... However, you know what does have a strong, well-documented correlation with autism? Air pollution. Childhood exposure to air pollution is clearly associated with higher rates of autism. Moreover, scientists have found a found a strong association between autism and pre-natal maternal exposure to particulate matter from fossil fuel pollution. ................ Trump’s campaign against vaccines won’t reduce autism, but it will cause many children to suffer devastating, possibly deadly, infections diseases. Meanwhile, autism rates will rise as a result of his crusade against clean energy and in favor of dirty energy. ............... we need to put Monday’s executive order in the context of the general right-wing turn against vaccines, and against science in general. ............... belief that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, a false belief that has soared in popularity — but, again, only among Republicans ............... Trump is very much taking an extremist position on vaccines. But it’s clearly a position that he believes will resonate with his base. .............. Anti-vaccine sentiment is a lot like climate change denial. In both cases, to understand the politics one must do two things. First, follow the money: look at which interest groups benefit financially from misinformation, and why those groups have power. Second, follow the culture war: ask why this particular misinformation resonates with the prejudices and grievances of a segment of the population. ................ At first sight, the monetary interests behind anti-vax politics are less obvious than the fossil-fuel interests backing climate denial. After all, nobody benefits directly when children get measles. .................. Peddling quack medicine is, however, a highly profitable business. And it’s a business deeply enmeshed with the right-wing media ecosystem: Ads for dietary supplements with no proven medical benefits and other forms of snake oil have for decades been a key revenue source for right-wing talk radio, conspiracy-theory websites, and more. So there is a longstanding connection between hucksters touting fake cures and hard-right politics. Some observers were startled to see Dr. Mehmet Oz — who has touted, among other things, the health wonders of bovine colostrum — named by Trump as administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, a job for which he has no relevant qualifications. But given the underlying monetary and political incentives, Oz’s appointment is no surprise. ................. The modern right is a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-expertise movement that is highly receptive to conspiracy theories. And like RFK Jr during his recent interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, when confronted with scientific facts it flies into a sputtering rage. So the snake oil industry targets its marketing to the kind of person who listens to the rants of right-wing influencers, gets their news from Newsmax, and finds common cause with the neo-Nazi posters on X. By framing their false claims as “The Medical Miracles that the Elites Don’t Want You to Know About”, the snake oil hucksters create a receptive audience for conspiracy theories that malign actual medical miracles like vaccines. ................. Unfortunately, Covid greatly boosted anti-vaccine forces. The witch hunt against Anthony Fauci shows how strong a hold anti-medical-science conspiracy theories now have on the Republican Party. This was not, to be clear, because medical science failed. In fact, the clear negative correlation across the United States between rates of Covid vaccination and Covid deaths was an object lesson in how effective vaccines can be. But those Americans already inclined to believe that the elites are out to get them, already hostile to any notion of collective action for the common good, reacted to vaccine mandates with rage. And their rage quickly generalized beyond preventive measures against Covid to preventive measures against all diseases — including measles. ............. Thanks to Trump and the triumph of snake oil, many American children will get sick from preventable diseases, some of them dying. And autism rates will continue to go up.
