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Comment by neerajk | Hacker News Reader

Possibly naive, but hopefully trying to reason from first principles:

The insurance companies are the ones paying for care. The hospital systems are the ones charging for care. The entity that pays for care has every incentive to keep costs _low_. The entity that charges for care has every incentive to charge as much as possible. i.e. The ire of consumers should be directed at hospital systems rather than insurance companies.

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IIRC, insurance companies benefit from high prices, as it benefits their gross profits. I forget whether that was due to regulations sort of capping profit margins, or what the reason was. I’ll see if I can track down a reference.

Edit: here’s an article on the topic https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/25/6136857...

It's only in the interests of health insurance companies to make costs lower if they do it in a way that doesn't make costs lower for other insurance companies. As long as costs are high for everyone they can charge more knowing the competitors cannot undercut them.

In fact it's often in the insurance companies interests to make premiums generally go up, because they make more actual money for taking the same percentage.

That is the way it used to be. For many of us in high deductible plans, we pay thousands of dollars each year for care before the insurance company pays for anything. Not to mention the thousands of dollars we pay each year in premiums to the insurance company.

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