Good article, and they definitely do skate on the line, but there aren’t any indictments and it doesn’t seem there is any evidence they are colluding. Just lack of enforcement by the feds means it pays off for everyone to break the rules, but even then, the business is not profiting much.
>Walmart's is lower than that
So? That doesn’t mean 5% is a low profit margin. And the other MCOs are at 3% or less.
> That's why they do stock buybacks.
The effects of stock buybacks are incorporated into the total return calculation, so not sure what the relevance of this is either.
I just don’t see the logical consistency of claiming a business is doing super shady things to earn ridiculous amounts of profit, and then the business not doing better than SP500.
Or why insurance premiums at all the non profits would similar to premiums at all the for profits.
The more likely and simple answer is that it’s a cutthroat business, where almost all revenue goes out as expenses, and that is why all the premiums are similar, because no one can really cut more costs than they already are.
I definitely do not accept that assertion. Especially for the big vertically integrated ones like UHC.
> Or you think there is a massive fraud and a nationwide conspiracy amongst 7 publicly listed businesses (UNH/Elevance/Cigna/CVS/Humana/Centene/Molina), and numerous non profits like Kaiser Permanente and various BCBS affiliated plans (because their premiums are basically the same as the for profit insurers).
Yes? It's a cartel.
"Massive fraud" isn't really even in dispute! https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/upshot/medicare-advantage...
> Even then, their profit margin is only 5% or so, which is objectively a low profit margins.
Walmart's is lower than that.
> The easiest thing to do though, is ask yourself why shareholders would accept lower annual returns if their business they own earns so much money?
That's why they do stock buybacks.
> You would think they could do better than SP500 if they were raking it in.
If everyone else wasn't also enshittifying at the same time, sure.