Beginning of the End for Major Health Insurers

[The Magistrate]

15. Current Masturbatory Practices Of Financial Analysts Do Not Impress Me, Sir

This flawed law ( and it is in my view massively flawed; I am a 'MediCare for all!' man myself ) does give promise of putting the industry in way of extinction, extinction in its present form at least.

It requires companies to pay out at minimum a portion of their 'handle' in benefits. It is too low a portion, mind, but what matters is that the regulation has been put into place at the Federal level. The mechanism by which it is enforced, checks from the company to policy-holders, will ensure it is a popular regulation; people like checks coming in the mail. It will be both popular and feasible to press for, and secure, change in this regulation which wrings more and more out of the companies, reducing the over-head and profit they are permitted in the health insurance trade.

One of the models in Europe is that people buy health insurance, but the division of the insurance company dealing with health insurance cannot make a profit; the benefit to the company comes from providing such good coverage and service in health insurabce that people are moved to buy their other insurance, homeowners, renters, life, auto, etc., from the company. This is pretty far from health insurance as practiced today in the United States, and would definitely be reachable with the tool-kit of regulations and precedents established by the Affordable Care Act.