Who Wants To Cut Their Healthcare Costs By 20% Instantly

[Pobeka]

59. AFAIK, health care companies are not bound by antitrust.

(BTW -- enjoying the discussion)

Yeps - when basic health care costs rise, all insurance companies benefit. The other side of the competition problem is the stockholders of publicly held companies would not be happy if a company didn't get as much of the allowed % and deliver that back to the stockholders (a different sort of competition, causing costs to rise).

Who has more power, stockholders of insurance companies, or clients? I don't know the breakout of publicly held insurance companies vs private so this may be a mute point, or an important one.

(Near as I can tell H.R. 372 passed the house in 2017, but has not made it through the senate. It would remove the antitrust exemption for health-care)

Even if that were not true (antitrust, stockholders), this is not like buying a gallon of milk, where at the point of sale you can go down the street and buy the same product, and that happens multiple times per year.

We are stuck and can only change insurance one a year, and at that time extracting the information about what coverage is actually provided when comparing insurance providers is nigh on impossible (we just went thru this.) It's impossible to make an informed decision necessary to make competition actually work. I'd think that competition would actually be effective it you could switch insurance providers when you get ill (cancer, accidents, whatever), and pick the one who offers the best bang for the buck. Obviously, that can't work, but something along those lines would be more effective at getting competition to lower prices...