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Medical insurance companies in the US are the agents by which health costs are kept down. In centralized government health systems the government itself does t
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Medical insurance companies in the US are the agents by which health costs are kept down. In centralized government health systems the government itself does this; in our system the insurance companies do it. They have the negotiating power that individual patients do not.
Part of keeping health costs down is rejecting some treatments as too expensive. Without this, costs will balloon forever as there is no one to say "enough".
- scottLobster 2mo agoThat's a nice theory. The stock prices of many of these companies seems to disagree. They aren't performing some tragic triage in the service of preventing the healthcare system from total collapse, they're making money. Lots of it. Directly from vulnerable peoples' needless deaths.
- pfdietz 2mo agoThese companies have very low profit margins (as a fraction of cash flowing through them). They have strong incentive to keep costs down. What does stock price have to do with this? A high stock price can just mean there's relatively few outstanding shares (you probably mean market cap). The largest health insurer in the US has a share of just 16% so the market is highly competitive.