Am I Just Getting Dumber? Or Is Trying To Get Healthcare Info That Hard?

I'm having this Groundhog Day-esque experience. I keep on clicking links that lead to other links that lead me back to the same link.

I have a fair bit of experience in translating from insurance-ese to normal layperson. But these forms and explanations have me lost.

This is so ridiculous. I can't even afford healthcare, but I have to go through insurance companies anyways. People who think that universal healthcare is a socialist nightmare are blind, greedy, stupid, or all three. That's right, I said it.

I would like to state, again, that despite the reforms contained in the Affordable Healthcare Act, it fails at the most crucial point: insurance companies are still an integral part of the healthcare system in the US. As long as insurance companies are negotiating deals with hospitals and providers, then health costs will continue to be artificially inflated and increased to the point of ridiculousness.

Any system in which point of sale cash payment is greater than bureacratic billing, you have a serious problem. It's called racketeering. The disparity between what an insurance company pays for a procedure and what an individual pays for the same procedure is outrageous.

The fact that insurance is required to get any feasible pricing on medicine, routine doctor's visits is at the root of the imbalance. Insurance should be for catastrophic, out of the norm events, not for getting your birth control or insulin or diagnostic labs. Sure, Obamacare prevents the criminally greedy practice of deny insurance based on pre existing conditions. But guess what?---people with preexisting conditions are still penalized. Their premiums are a lot more. You can go broke just trying to maintain coverage to help you stay alive.

The ACHA has just further empowered insurance companies: companies who are focused on profit margins, not on the welfare of patients. Companies who have already banded together to insure maintenance of artificially inflated health costs. Companies who have shown they will throw any customer under the bus if they can get away with it, regardless of the health detriments to the patient.

Obamacare, from what I've seen, is just like giving Viagra to a rapist, then telling him to play nice. The problem is not affordable insurance. The problem is insurance, period. People shouldn't have to negotiate through a middleman to get medical treatment (since they already have to do that with doctors, which is a whole other bilious rant).

I'm not even mad typing this. I'm exhausted. I've been trying to look up healthcare plans for the last two hours. And I keep falling asleep. My brain has gone past tired and into depressed defeat. And even if I get something resolved soon, the way the system is set up I will have to fly back to CA to see a physician.

This system is nauseating. Our greed is disgusting. Our empowerment of the already powerful and castration of the less fortunate is sickening.

Should the world end, we have certainly earned it. Humanity is appalling.