Re:From $479 to $2,800 a month for ACA health insurance next...
by jzackpete on Saturday August 23, 2025 @10:17PM
(#45000736)
I'm talking about the regulatory capture of everything related to health care: medications, credentialing, insurance, etc.
Any regulation imposed on the production of a good or provision of a service is a constraint on the supply. Reducing supply increases costs. I fail to see how the imposition of one insurance company (a monopoly) would improve that.
When Medicare was created, medical care accounted for less than 7% of GDP. It's around 20% now[1]. If you extrapolate life expectancy from before Medicare to now, has that massive increase in spending changed the trajectory at all?
You see the same phenomenon in higher education: we subsidize demand through government-backed loans, and costs and administrative overhead skyrockets.
[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
This isn’t theoretical. Medicare already has been supporting the most frequent users of the system for decades. It’s a proven system with low overheads.
Yes there’s probably abuse but overall it has high satisfaction from its stakeholders.