I love the two claims about health insurance companies: simultaneously denying coverage for needed healthcare, and "scaling" up their healthcare costs to increase profit.
There's no inconsistency in those statements, because there are also for-profit health insurance companies (that deny coverage) and not-for-profit ones (that balloon costs)
That premise must be invalid because if true, no one would buy insurance from for profit insurance companies. Their prices are all basically the same, approved by the same state government employees.
Plus the out of pocket maximums are a pittance compared to what complicated healthcare costs can be, so paying more for premiums to ensure you are not denied coverage would be a no brainer.
Alas, that is not the case, so the reality must be different from the premise.
Also, here's a non profit health insurance company denying coverage:
None of that invalidates what I said as a general rule for health insurance company behaviors that are also very well documented in media, so I'm not sure what you're trying to clarify for me here.
> That premise must be invalid because if true, no one would buy insurance from for profit insurance companies.
What premise? That companies balloon costs or aim to provide less care if they can get away with it? It's a complete non-sequitur if you think so.
>because there are also for-profit health insurance companies (that deny coverage) and not-for-profit ones (that balloon costs)
The claim that for profit health insurance companies deny coverage to save money and non profit health insurance companies balloon costs to maximize healthcare expenses is obviously wrong (as demonstrated in previous comment).
The claim that health insurance companies in general both deny coverage to reduce healthcare expenses and maximize healthcare expenses to increase profit is obviously wrong, because it's inherently contradictory.
>behaviors that are also very well documented in media
I don't see any documentation of this behavior. The documentation that does exist is the whole business limps along on a knife's edge, lagging SP500, while have no power to set their prices (the government has to approve their prices). They certainly do engage in outsourcing and underemployment, perhaps to intentionally delay and deny care, but probably leading to just as many incorrect approvals as incorrect denials (obviously you won't hear about the former in the media).
The for-profit ones have capped profits as a percent of costs(e.g. 80-20% rule).
Therefore, game theory predicts they support costs increases that are industry wide (raise all boats), and oppose them when only the company is impacted (lose market share or profit).
They don't.
Because despite being labeled as not-for-profit, they will always scale up their "cost" to match their revenues, and live on the 1-2% difference.
They want the absolute nominal dollar values for care to be as high as humanly possible.