Comment by Aurornis
1 day ago
> Unfortunately these discussions almost never go well, because it seems that most people have at best a surface level understanding of what insurance is and how it works, and everyone is convinced that it's a full scam and insurance companies are fabricating everything
I have the exact same experience when discussing anything insurance related: People have wild assumptions about how much profit insurance companies are making.
When I ask people how much cheaper they think their insurance (health, home, etc) would be if we forced insurance company profits to zero they usually have some extreme guess like 50%. When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs they just don’t believe it. The discourse is so cooked that everyone who just assumes insurers are making unbelievable profits without ever checking.
Like you said, when I try to bring numbers into the discussion I get accused of being a shill (or a “bootlicker” if the other person is young).
The environment this creates has opened the door for some really bad politics to intervene in ways that aren’t helpful. I wouldn’t be surprised if the eventual outcome in a lot of these places is that politicians pass legislation putting the local government on the hook for insurance after they squeeze regular insurers so hard they have to back out to avoid losing money in those markets. The consequences won’t manifest for several years, potentially after the politicians have left office, but could be financially burdensome. Similar to how many local governments were very generous with pension plans because politicians knew the consequences would only be felt by their successors.
Health insurance's issue is probably how it induces pure waste everywhere as everyone has to play this dance of ever escalating paperwork which consumes a lot of labor. It's not profit, it's waste. Same with the ever increasing amount of admin. Why is that admin increasing? I estimate insurance or requirements created by insurance is part of the cause.
There is also a lot of other smells of a lack of a competitive market. Very opaque pricing, limits to how many hospitals can be opened in a region, needing paperwork to push against that limit, limits in residency slots, the entire hazing ritual of residency in the first place, limits in opening medical schools, ever escalating requirements to become a doctor, restrictions against doctor owned hospitals or clinics, the fact something like an epipen is still not out of patent and not having many clones by now, large barriers to make medical devices and medications, while simultaneously having great issues with generic drug quality, a horrible food system compared to Europe, while simultaneously having a much harder regulatory state medically compared to europe, etc.
This is spot on. It’s not that I think health insurance companies are making insane profit margins. It’s that their very existence in the system is a pure negative and in fact a moral blight. Inflicting profit into a system that is entirely dedicated to human health is by definition a conflict of interest for basically everyone involved, even if it operated at a hypothetical 100% efficiency.
Lots of things necessary for life are run by for-profit businesses — for example, food production. Do farmers have a “conflict of interest”? What about healthcare in particular makes profit immoral?
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I don’t think health insurance is actually insurance, but I have seen little evidence that it has “insane profit margins”. From what I’ve read, ‘health insurance’ has middling profit margins relative to other insurance specialties; where are you getting that view/data?
> When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs they just don’t believe it.
Meanwhile, the health care providers:
> But if you look at the list of companies with the highest [return on equity], you see health care providers or suppliers like HCA Healthcare (272%), Cencora (234%), Abbvie (84%), Mckesson (84%), Novo Nordisk (72%), Eli Lilly (59%), Amgen (56%), IDEXX Laboratories (53%), Zoetis (46%), Novartis (44%), Edwards Lifesciences (43%), and so on. If you want to know which shareholders are making the real money in the health care industry…well, it’s the shareholders of those providers and suppliers.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/insurance-companies-arent-the-...
Definition of "healthcare provider" really confuses me. Why is my nurse lumped together with people researching drugs? Is the CEO of the hospital a "provider"?
> When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs they just don’t believe it.
When you consider that single digit percentages of trillions of dollars is still an obscene amount of money it makes sense. People making tens of billions by applying formulas to spreadsheets and shuffling other people’s money around doesn’t sit right with most people.
I hear the same thing about supermarkets. Their margins are razor thin (1-3%), and yet people look at the overall profits and complain, ignoring the fact that the company had to deploy 50-100 times that capital to make that profit.
An alternative is to split these companies into smaller companies, which will each have much lower profits but also higher costs due to lost efficiencies, but people will not be happy with that either.
>People making tens of billions by applying formulas to spreadsheets and shuffling other people’s money around doesn’t sit right with most people.
The federal government will pay you $4.4 billion a year[1] if you lend them a trillion dollars, no "shuffling money around" required.
[1] current 5-year treasury yields
$44 billion
Those people are not collecting the profits by moving their own money around.
The profit margin doesn't include things like CEO salary, correct? I could see a scenario where the issue is still corporate greed just not greed that's measured by profit.
All employee compensation, including CEO and board of directors, is included in the expenses used to calculate profit margin.
Profit margin is all revenue minus all expenses.
Isn't that a bit misleading? Salaries wouldn't be included, but a lot of compensation at the very high end is based on owning stock, and dividends i assume would be part of that profit margin.
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Executive pay is such a tiny fraction that eliminating it would be lost in period to period fluctuations.
>When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs
Do you have any source for this?
I’m assuming (because HN) that you had the USA in mind, and it doesn’t pass the sniff test for me given that US insurance fees are more than single digit percentages higher than other high quality care countries with privatised healthcare systems
Insurance fees are not high because the insurance companies are making huge profits.
They're high because providers are making huge profits.
Now granted, they may ultimately be the same thing, but that's a different discussion [1]
In the context of housing (fires, hurricanes etc) insurance is expensive because housing is expensive to build.
[1] insurance companies have to invest their income somewhere. It makes sense to choose companies will high returns. Which includes some health care providers. Which can basically change whatever they like because of structural reasons that have been well discussed.
> Insurance fees are not high because the insurance companies are making huge profits.
United Healthcare alone made $23,000,000,000 in profit in 2023. Health insurance companies have collectively made $371 billion in profits since the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Property & Liability insurance (home, car, etc) have relatively modest profit margins, but health insurance companies absolutely are making huge profits.
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The issue in the US is that there is no price regulation for different procedures (other than Medicare), plus the providers (hospital chains) are intertwined* with insurance. The end result is everyone charges as much as they can and the premiums need to be high, even if insurance technically negotiates the rates down from the “sticker” price. Insurance companies are willing to take a small percent of profit because there is so much money being taken from customers.
* https://www.statnews.com/2024/11/25/unitedhealth-higher-paym...
Right, low profit margins are not a valid argument for why it’s invalid for consumers to suspect there is some inefficiency compared to other markets. Saying the system must be efficient because profits are low is like saying boiling water should be as cheap as 98->99 degrees C because it’s just +1 C - profit margins aren’t as good an indicator of whether there is an unusual amount of disorder in the system, compared to extremely context-sensitive resource costs for hypothetically identical systems.
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Part of the problem is that the existence of the middle man adds a lot of costs: insurance company salaries, their executives, doctor's office billing coding, advertising, etc.
The shareholders take home only a fraction. But a lot of money gets spent that simply doesn't need to be. Other countries avoid the deadweight loss of the middle man.
>Part of the problem is that the existence of the middle man adds a lot of costs: insurance company salaries, their executives, doctor's office billing coding, advertising, etc.
that's not a sophisticated analysis. it would be like saying mcdonalds is unecessarily expensive because executive pay, and cars, and dry cleaning, etc. etc. yet, if you tried to found a competitor, you'd have all those same expenses. even charities have to pay management.
insurance companies make money because their aggregate risk is less than your individual risk, and you really don't want your individual risk so you are willing to pay them extra, a premium, to get them to shore up your downside. After that it's like any other company selling any other thing.
The genius of the US way is that the politicians avoid the heat when healthcare coverage is denied. Whereas UK and Canadian politicians have to answer to their constituents.
Of course, now that getting murdered is on the table, the US health insurance executives might want to up their compensation.
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That’s because healthcare is unusually expensive in the US, not because insurers’ profit margins are unusually high.
These are all the publicly listed health insurers in the US, with public financials, so the numbers come from the 10-Q and 10-K reports filed with the SEC.
Note that the first one, United Health, has slightly higher profit margins than the rest because UNH has an enormous business selling healthcare itself, not just insurance (they own a lot of doctor groups and outpatient clinics and employ a lot of doctors and nurses).
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-g...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ELV/elevance-healt...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CI/cigna-group/pro...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CVS/cvs-health/pro...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/HUM/humana/profit-...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CNC/centene/profit...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MOH/molina-healthc...
The other big insurers will be Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and various plans franchised with Blue Cross Blue Shield, but they are all non profit.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/941...
Some Blue Cross Blue Shield Association members are for-profit corporations now.
As for UnitedHealth Group, much of their profit comes from a large software business which is separate from their insurance, care delivery, and PBM businesses. If that software business was spun out it would be one of the 20 largest US tech companies.
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You can literally read the 10-K statement from any of several publicly traded medical insurance companies. Average industry profit margin is about 3%. There are also some non-profit insurers but their fees generally aren't any lower.
Or they see that as a cute bit of misdirection. Profits are capped as a percentage of healthcare costs, sure. Healthcare costs are not capped. Drive up the cost of care, drive up the profits.
You ever think it's curious that for-profit insurance companies pay out 2–3x what Medicare does for the same procedures?
> Or they see that as a cute bit of misdirection. Profits are capped as a percentage of healthcare costs, sure. [...]
You know what else is "a cute bit of misdirection"? Mentioning that profits are capped without mentioning why it's that way in the first place.
>You ever think it's curious that for-profit insurance companies pay out 2–3x what Medicare does for the same procedures?
...because the government low-balls healthcare providers?
And yet Medicare is widely accepted. Go figure.
You do realize health insurers have federally mandated caps on their profits, which simply incentivizes creative accounting to make money in more oblique ways, right?
>When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs they just don’t believe it.
It's not that I don't believe it, it's that this figure is completely unrelated to the damage and waste caused by the system of healthcare and health insurance we have in the US.
I mean, in a system of chattel slavery, you see above-normal profits competed away, but that in no way means the system isn't exploiting anyone, because that's not how the harm shows up! And yet still we'd see that argument get batted around in comments like yours:
"No, your owner can't possibly be exploiting you because, when you consider your purchase cost, he doesn't actually make much profit!"
Health Insurance IS a huge racket. Insurance profits are only a small slice. Executive compensation isn't part of profits. The profits of the required sole source medical supplies company isn't part of insurance profits. The contracts, salaries, benefit packages, overpayments, and waste of healthcare systems and pharmaceutical companies aren't reflected in insurance profits. Just looking at the raw profit percentages returned to shareholders is absolutely meaningless.
You have to look at the entire healthcare picture and realize that insurance is the system driving the exorbitant costs. There is no legitimate reason for healthcare prices to be so insane.
> There is no legitimate reason for healthcare prices to be so insane.
these profit margins are why some people claim that the US is actually subsidizing the rest of the world's low cost health outcomes.
These companies make money in the US, at high margins, which enables them to operate at low margins in other more regulated countries.
This might apply to Pharma, which actually operates in international markets, but not to US health insurers, PBMs, or for-profit Healthcare providers.
>Health Insurance IS a huge racket. Insurance profits are only a small slice. Executive compensation isn't part of profits.
"Executive compensation" is even a "smaller slice" than profits, orders of magnitude smaller.