The U.S. government should bill the health insurance companies for the cost of the websites.
Before the exchanges and the standardized tiers of care, plans were very difficult for consumers to quantitatively compare. Most consumers didn't bother, so insurance companies were able to differentiate themselves with advertising and "fluff features" (easy) rather than by cutting costs and increasing efficiency (hard). Not only did consumers pay for the higher margins that came from fluff-differentiation, but they also never benefitted from competition over efficiency. The setup was good for insurance companies and bad for consumers. Now the party is over and the insurance companies are upset that their cash cow has been slaughtered.
Good riddance.
Also, why do you think "you can barely call it insurance anymore"? It used to be that insurance companies in the individual market were allowed to invent excuses to dump their expensive customers and then they were allowed to raise their prices if the customer wanted back in. Basically, the individual insurance market degraded into "pay the full price of any chronic condition you have." I wouldn't call that insurance, I'd call that pay-as-you-go-with-a-middleman. Now that they actually have to provide the "peace of mind" that they sell, I think the argument is much stronger for calling them insurance companies.
So, basically, the opposite of what you said.
Anyway. There's no health insurance market anymore. There's a pre-paid healthcare services market which we call "insurance", with a nearly uniform price guaranteed to all (variance in prices regulated by the government), a very specific government-mandated bundle of services that it must provide, a government-mandated maximum profit margin, and a government mandate that the services be purchased.
So if that's your picture of healthy "competition" in a market... well, I guess you're entitled to that opinion but then I kinda wonder what you must think about the rest of the tech startups that get discussed around here.
Also, don't forget the other tricks: shifting billing dates around, losing invoices in the mail, using the customer's income to calculate copays which would bankrupt them before they could afford expensive treatment... the list goes on.
EDIT: this is why I said that the insurance companies had to find an excuse to drop people, rather than just drop people. The really obvious stuff tends to be illegal.
Regulation is not inherently the opposite of competition. Regulatory capture sucks, but so do perverse incentives. The healthcare market has a bad infestation of perverse incentives, and regulation is the only tool we have to go after them.
Well, that or universal health care: http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourc...
> I kinda wonder what you must think about the rest of the tech startups that get discussed around here.
I kinda wonder what you think about net neutrality. Good or bad?
Also, we wouldn't expect their CEOs to make much of a stink about this, at least not publicly (perhaps I should have said "hurting" instead of "whining"). We would expect them to be busy telling investors how they plan to best take advantage of the new rules. Because that's what they're paid to do. Any CEO who says they don't know how to do this is begging to be replaced.
We'll be able to tell who was right in 3-4 years by comparing their margins (or another metric like administrative overhead) to what we see today in the individual insurance market. I would bet a sizable chunk of money that they will be much closer to the margins we see in the employer-provided insurance market today.
That's what the insurance companies are afraid of.
[1] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-21/are-obamaca...