From a personal conversation with an insurance company board member, I’ve been told this isn’t a factor as most aren’t running anywhere close to that line. The bigger factor in his eyes is healthcare providers building local monopolies. I don’t know how true that is, but I wanted to share.
Well he was just shoving the issues under the rug.
In fairness, he's not wrong, and neither is parent. Hospitals companies have local monopolies, which they can use to charge ridiculously high prices. On the other hand, insurance companies do get a kickback of sorts when the hospitals bump prices - the negotiators get compensation based on the dollar amount of savings they can bring from negotiation, so effectively, even if the hospital bumps prices high enough and renegotiates the chargemaster rates to a lower one, while still ensuring a profit for the negotiators, they'll go for it. Bloomberg did a nice write up of it a few years back, but it's now behind pay wall.
Yeah, that’s another good nuance. Ultimately many factors drive hyperinflationary healthcare costs. Everyone’s making money.
I think my takeaway from the whole conversation is that the insurance business can be counterintuitive to outsiders. Salvation may not be as simple as getting rid of them.
Another tidbit is that insurance companies don’t mind being the bad guys. I’m not sure if our focus on that industry blinds us to effective solutions for controlling costs.
I don't think eliminating private insurers is a panacea. I just think that the nature of incentives and negotiation between hospitals and insurers has resulted in plainly ridiculous chargemaster prices that harm uninsured and underinsured patients (including those who are "out of network").
Public disclosure and reputational price-indexing as well as regulation of emergency and regionally-monopolized non-elective care would help a lot, but backing the train up on decades of broken incentives and profit-optimized behavior is no small task.
