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Aetna CEO Threatened Obamacare Pullout If Feds Opposed Humana Merger

(www.huffingtonpost.com)
142 points helloworld | 1 comments | 17 Aug 16 17:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.6s | source
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seibelj ◴[17 Aug 16 18:06 UTC] No.12306806[source]▶
Can anyone succinctly explain the benefits of having a market for private health insurance companies, rather than a single provider of health insurance (government, aka "public option")? Can a capitalist case be made for their existence? Does the lack of a large private insurance market in countries with government-provided health insurance cause lots of inefficiencies and waste?
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1. 20yrs_no_equity ◴[17 Aug 16 20:50 UTC] No.12308357[source]▶
> Can a capitalist case be made for their existence?

Yes, and rather than do it myself, I'll let Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman do it:

http://www.hoover.org/research/how-cure-health-care-0

Note the date. He did studies in the 1970s and updated them in the 1990s with consistent results. This was all well known and the case was made repeatedly before Obamacare was passed.