That is ridiculously unfair. We're talking totals in the tens of millions for these procedures. You can make a very good argument it should be paid for by some other public means and I would not necessarily disagree with you, but given that doesn't currently happen, insurance did a lot more than just skim off the top. They paid for the work. And I'm not aware of any society out there right now that publicly provides free to the consumer home and auto repair.

I agree that the providers themselves, along with the basic science and engineering that made their work possible in the first place, deserves the bulk of the credit, but nobody was attacking physicians and scientists here.

For what it's worth, in plenty of other Reddit-style "everthing sucks and I'm pessimistic about technology" threads, I'm out there touting these same stories as examples of science and technology making the world better, as many of these procedures either weren't possible or had far worse success rates as recently as 20 years ago. This just wasn't one of those threads.

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hamdingers 3 days ago | parent [-]

I appreciate this backpedaling, but within the context of the thread your first comment credits insurance with your 7 orthopedic surgeries, and to that my response is more than fair.

I'm not sure what to make of the non sequitur to reddit threads though.

	▲	close04 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Your take is non-sensical and obtuse, and the attitude is not much better so I’d hold off on the celebratory self-pat on the back. The people who do the job should get a lot of the credit. But none of them do it for free. Insurance is there to make sure you can pay those people for what needs to be done in the aftermath of very unlikely but very high impact events. A lot of people pay very little so a few people don’t have to pay a lot. The industry has a lot of failings but this doesn’t wipe out the utility of the service.