> Yes, and always will be, but costs have ben obfuscated for years. For-profit health insurance is one of the big issues, in my opinion [1]. I have no kind wor

> Yes, and always will be, but costs have ben obfuscated for years. For-profit health insurance is one of the big issues, in my opinion [1]. I have no kind words for for-profit health insurance, having been burned by the industry myself. Being for-profit definitely doesn't help, but the non-profit insurers in the US are not much better. The truth is, the incentives are terrible all around, including -- and you won't read this in Stanford Medicine's quarterly magazine -- the fact that we train far too few doctors, nurses, and other medical staff, work them far too hard while not using their time well, and pay them very, very generously. Then again, the cost of higher education has grown tremendously too, without (that many) for-profits taking a cut, and that's an industry where we face no shortage of qualified professors, work them harder (oddly) the less they get paid, and pay the ones teaching the most classes, well, let's just say it's not "very generously". Perhaps the major commonality is that the people getting the service are often not the ones paying (at least, up front) -- either insurers or lenders are? That and also these are both highly human-capital-intensive industries.