Health Insurer "Profits" Are Not the Problem

2009-10-25 - An Associated Press "fact check" article today notes that health insurer profits are not high, to refute complaints about profiteering. But the final profit margin is not the relevant statistic. Corporate health insurers have a variety of pre-profit expenditures that waste patient money and which would be unnecessary under a single-payer system. These include (1) exorbitant pay to top executives, (2) billions of dollars spent on advertising to take market share from competitors that offer an extremely similar product, (3) many corporations duplicating the same bureaucracy, (4) researching all claims to deny coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions (or for any other reason they can find), and (5) lobbying (bribing) Congress to rigorously prevent a better alternative. Instead they insist that everyone be legally required to buy their exceedingly wasteful product. So if you think they're gouging us now, just wait until we're a captive market.

America. Where you're free to choose between a thousand redundant health insurance bureaucracies that exist to distribute your money to their rich owners.