Bah. Say what you like about the old model, but you can't really call what the insurance companies have been mandated to do under the ACA "competition" -- you can barely call it insurance anymore.
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?