| There’s some nuance to this. The ACA’s loss ratio rules don’t apply to self-funded plans (many large employers use these) even if they’re administered (and possibly re-insured) by a health insurance company, which is usually the case. Just doesn’t apply at all. Certain plans also allow much lower loss ratios, like 60/40 for expat plans. A provider that manages to have a lot of new plans in a given state in a given year is immune from loss ratios rules in that state, for that year. I don’t know how gameable this is but my WAG would be it’s only state insurance commissions preventing this from being the case in every state, every year, for every provider, and keeping it to only some states in some years for some providers (I bet the biggies manage to rotate their state[s] and have at least one most years) So a company the only business of which is health insurance can easily spend far less than 80 or 85% of income on payouts, and only need maintain that ratio on some subset—possibly small—of the premiums it’s collecting. I don’t know how the game of this affects decisions for insurers that also own providers, but I bet there’s something beneficial there and that’s why they’ve been snapping up provider offices for the last several years. |
At the end of the day, my experience is that my UHC healthcare is about 10% more than healthcare from non-profit Kaiser, and Kaiser is far more stingy with services.
I think there is a hell of a lot wrong with healthcare in the US, but I don't think that constitutes murder just because the stakes are life an death.
Ethics depend not just on the outcome, but the processes that leads to that outcome.
The incentives in healthcare are terrible, but it is the government which has structured the system and those incentives.