@Kasz. Oh I know that medicare is the biggest company in the US, it just seems odd that so little of the rest of the market is represented in those statistics. If we take the 20% figure, then those figures are comparing it to approximately 7% of the market.

There is possibly a perfectly good reason for that, I'm just wondering what it is.

1) No.  Private healthcare doens't have to accomadate to your needs even if they're frivelous.

In fact the exact opposite argument is the one that's usually made.  Private Insurance comapnies use every trick they can to deny you healthcare coverage.

In reality, in the US you are given a choice of many different plans that spell out exactly what is and what won't be used.

2) Medicaid only covers about 20% of the people in the US.  You can't submit a claim to medicare unless you've been approved for Medicare.  Furthermore the AMA report card actually lists the reasons for denial and their percentages.  Medicare's denial reasons don't really deviate much from other plans.  One of the things I was looking over because I thought there might be something there.

They only picked the largest and most wasteful insurers.

It's part of the AMA's "Heal the Claims process."

It's part of that "without a political backer" thing I was talking about.

The AMA's "Heal the Claims Process" is a movement that wants to get people to demand that bigger companies reduce the bueracracy of insurance companies and make the processing a claim equal only 1% of an operation.

So that if the country spends 500 billion in healthcare coperations... it spends only 5 billion in administration.  Greatly making healthcare more affordable by all.

In general they pick the companies that spend the most on administration and deny the most claims because it makes them look bad... and the AMA's position look good.  Which is actually the third position that's been overlooked in the medicare debate.

So little of the private insurance is listed because the rest of the private insurers are better when it comes to administration costs... really the smaller insurance companies are built on smaller customers who often go through insruance brokers...

They rely on their people more so they treat them better.  For example I used to have insurance with once company, they greatly started raising rates.  My Insurance broker got fed up.  Switched companies... and took a LOT of his clients with him... and a bunch of brokers did this... and now the company is in trouble.

A lot of insruance brokers for smaller companies generally just get people they know to go through plans... hence why small companies need to treat those brokers and their people better... plus since they are so small they don't need layer opon layer of people like Medicare does.

Honestly the most embarrassing number for medicare isn't that... it's that Medicare follows the Medicare reimbursement policies 49.9% of the time.

They don't even follow their own policies more then half the time...

The entire report his here...

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/368/reportcard.pdf

"Private healthcare companies use every trick they can to deny you healthcare coverage"... Oooh, goody, I really want to go on private healthcare please. J/k I think you meant to phrase that differently Kasz

I think maybe things are a bit different here in Britain, because we have a hybrid system covered largely by the NHS, the only private system are usually very high quality so they can compete with the national system. Maybe this leads them to attempt to accommodate the customers needs more. 

Come to think of it, because the USA has low national coverage then the private systems can have much wider quality gradations in comparison to Britain. So yeah, you're right, I'm using the British system as a model which is a flawed comparison.

For there to be a denial there has to be a request in the first place. Maybe people who use Medicare do more requests than others?

Statistics can often be misleading, in very weird and sometimes hard to see ways.

No, i actually don't want to phrase it differently.

That's the arguement used against them.  That doesn't mean it's true.

In reality our public system as you can see... denies more people.

The problem in our healthcare isn't lack of a public option.  It's that insruance laws are crafted to give an advantage to big companies.  If we had a legion of smaller private insurers our costs would drop rapidly.

That's why there is a percentage their NJ5.  Medicare denies the most claims on average.

At best you could argue that for some reason people on Medicare put it more frivelous claims then other people.

However that's a fairly untenable arguement and one that if proven correctly would still be a negative indictment on public run healthcare since it still costs the same to process a rejected claim.

It would suggest that a public system's administration costs would be higher and not lower then what we currently have.

^ bolded (that's what I meant, maybe I didn't explain myself well)

I'm not saying it's necessarily the case but maybe the people who have other insurers know the rules better for some reason. I mean if you had an extremely stingy insurer, at some point you'd stop bothering. Maybe it would help to see the data for several years to see if there's such a trend.

How would serveral years help?  I mean new insurees enter the market every year and old customers leave every year. 

A several year study would show no difference even if that was your contention.

The 2009 numbers do appear simialr however.  With Medicare being second this time to Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

Which... I honestly didn't think even existed anymore.