It also has enough dough to bestow huge pay packages on its top executives. The CEOs of the five largest for-profit health insurance companies each raked in $10 to $15 million last year.
After the mergers, the biggest insurers will have even larger profits, higher share values, and fatter pay packages for their top brass.
There's abundant evidence that when health insurers merge, premiums rise. For example, Leemore Dafny, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and her two co-authors, found that after Aetna merged with Prudential HealthCare in 1999, premiums rose 7 percent higher than had the merger not occurred.
The problem isn't Obamacare. The real problem is the current patchwork of state insurance regulations, insurance commissioners, and federal regulators can't stop the tidal wave of mergers, or limit the economic and political power of the emerging giants.
Which is why, ultimately, Americans will have to make a choice.
If we continue in the direction we're headed we'll soon have a health insurance system dominated by two or three mammoth for-profit corporations capable of squeezing employees and consumers for all they're worth -- and handing over the profits to their shareholders and executives.
The alternative is a government-run single payer system -- such as is in place in almost every other advanced economy -- dedicated to lower premiums and better care.
Which do you prefer?
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