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Comment by psadauskas | Hacker News Reader

Health insurance company profits are capped at 20% of the premiums they take in[1]. So not only because they _can_, but they actively want healthcare costs to go up, because that's the only way they get to increase their profits.

https://www.healthcare.gov/health-care-law-protections/rate-...

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Meanwhile in Germany and Switzerland there are non-profit health insurance companies:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany#Health_i...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland#Comp...

Both usually rank quite well in various international comparisons.

The US has a great healthcare system, but abysmal health insurance.

Lots (perhaps most?) of US health insurance providers also non-profit.

Are lot of tiny non profit insurance companies exist generally created by companies or religious groups to run their insurance. However, in terms of the overall market share it’s under 1/3 and significantly less when you look at companies that accept anyone.

Lot's of Hospital Systems in the US are ostensibly non-profit, but the number of Administrators & executives (and their salaries and bonuses) have been going way up

This doesn't appear to be true. There are other ways for health insurance companies to increase profits.

The US Health insurance industry spends on average, 86% of premiums on healthcare costs[0], which means they can increase their profits by reducing those costs, since 80% is the floor.

12% of the left over premium gets spent on operating expenses, which leaves the industry with a 2-3% profit margin[0]. So another way of increasing profits is for the companies to become more efficient.

These figures are for the industry as a whole. Any individual company will have other avenues of increasing profit, such as growing their market share.

[0] https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/20...

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