[sarchertech]

I agree we need to do more. I do wonder if just providing a public option to compete against private insurance is the way to go though.

>profit caps

We have profit caps on health insurance. It has many downsides though. The first is that it removes incentives for health insurers to reduce healthcare costs. It actually incentives them to want higher healthcare costs because 15% of a bigger number is more money.

Second, it incentives things like spinning out your insurance division into separate company and then buying an urgent care clinic to run as a sibling company to the insurance company.

Then when the insurance company spends their required 85% on healthcare costs, they just make sure a big chunk of that is spent on services from the sibling provider company.

United Healthcare does exactly this.

Of course functional regulators could stop this, but it’s hard and they don’t. Which is why I think offering a public instead of some of these direct regulations of private companies might work better.