It’s working like it’s supposed to

I hear a lot of complaints about health care (or rather insurance), finances, politics, and more. I hear lots of people complain that these systems are broken and not working properly.

I disagree. I think these systems are working exactly the way they were designed to work.

We are getting the results that were intended. It’s just that the people who aren’t being served (the vast majority) thought these systems were designed to serve them. They aren’t.

Here’s the rub though – It’s not because someone or a group of someones was interested in intentionally harming others, but rather they are trying to benefit themselves. Self interest is usually the motivation for so many things. And it is why systems end up hurting people. When we are so focused on what we, personally, can get out of something, that we’ve lost sight of the humanity of others and really ourselves. All we end up doing is caring about how we benefit.

Did we really think having private profit-motivated health insurance would actually serve the public best? For-profit companies exist to make their shareholders/owners money. There are arguments that say that serving your customers will accomplish this best. And yet, we have record profits for private for-profit insurance companies who are not doing that. For-profit insurance, where a person at a desk (most likely without a degree in any type of medical practice but is armed with an algorithm), who doesn’t know you or your doctor and doesn’t care who you are, making a decision about what procedures or medications you are allowed to have doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Putting people in charge of deciding what procedures or medication a person can have who is incentivized to cut costs and save the company money makes a whole lot of cents, but not much sense. It’s working exactly as it’s supposed to.

Our politics is producing the results that it was intended to produce. We should not be surprised by any of it. Same for finance. Conflicts in the world fit into this as well. You see, there’s a whole lot of money to be made in war, in politics, in finance.

Before we start complaining about any system we are participating in (whether by choice or not), we should ask ourselves this question – who benefits from this system as it currently is? If the answer is a single name, or a small group of people or a company, rather than the larger public, then you know why it’s working the way it is. It’s working exactly the way it was intended to work.