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WENDELL POTTER They don't. And it is unique to our multipayer system. There's no other country in the world that finances health care like we do. The thing you have to realize is the competition doesn't work in health care, certainly not in health insurance, like it does in any other sector of the economy. When you have multiple insurance companies in a given market, and you have very large hospital systems in that market, thosenone of those insurance companies are really large enough to negotiate all that favorable, very favorable rates, with those big hospital systems. And hospitals have been consolidating, sometimes in self-defense, because you've also had consolidation on the insurance side, as well, too. So you've kind of had this arms race of mergers and acquisitions both on insurance, the insurance side, and the provider side.
But as a consequence, insurance companies just can't control health care costs. They also don't really care about it, because the more health care costs go up, the more they're able to demand in premiums from the customers that are still with them. So that means they get more revenues.
PAUL JAY Is there another part to this? I mean, as we know, it's Wall Street, big capital, big finance, that owns, that predominantly owns the big health insurance companies. But they also own a lot of the companies that are selling the stuff to the hospitals. So they get it on both sides of this.
WENDELL POTTER They do. They do. The winners in this country are the shareholders ofwhen it comes to health care in this country, the big winners are the executives and the shareholders of the big companies, whether we're talking about insurance companies, or hospital companies, or drug companies, or medical device manufacturers. They're making out like bandits. The rest of us are being robbed.
But the thing is that we have a system that is really controlled by Wall Street, by shareholders and a small group of financial analysts. And I'm sure there are very few people who are watching this who know the name of a single financial analyst who covers the health care sector. But they're incredibly influential.
PAUL JAY OK. In the next segment of our interview we're going to dig into the debate: Fix ACAWendell has outlined the deficiencies of ACA, but a lot of people in the Democratic Party are saying fix it, because Medicare for All is either unaffordable, it's too hard to pass, so fix what we already gotversus move to Medicare for All, get private insurance companies out of the health insurance business altogether.
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