How often do health insurers say no to patients? (2023)

Health insurance companies do not provide any medical services. They are the middle man between patients and the places/people that actual do provide medical services. So when they deny coverage, they just keep all the premiums paid by the patient. That money is sucked up by the middle man. So you don't need to raise premiums, you need to lower profits at health insurance companies. Every billion they make in profit is a billion paid by patients and not received in services.

You could say the are negative medical services providers as they remove doctors from practicing medicine in order to have the doctors do non-medical insurance coverage work.

The waste is not "every billion they make in profit". It's every billion they make.

> They are the middle man between patients and the places/people that actual do provide medical services

This is the same way Medicaid/Medicare works too. Maybe they are the Neutral Good whereas insurance companies are the Neutral Evil.

> Health insurance companies do not provide any medical services.

This is substantively not true (though literally true at the level of a company, due to separate companies within the Kaier consortium) of the nation’s largest managed core organization, the Kaiser consortium consisting of the Kaiser Foundation health plans and the Kaiser Permanente Medical Groups.

> No when they deny coverage, they just keep all the premiums paid by the patient. That money is sucked up by the middle man. So you don't need to raise premiums, you need to lower profits at health insurance companies.

Something like limiting retained profits at the plan level to a fixed fraction of costs covered, and requiring refund of excess premiums to members?

> requiring refund of excess premiums to members

The solution is to provide the medical services people bought the insurance to cover and not reflexively deny claims counting on at least some people to give up or die.