Klepper wrote that this way of doing business has been "spectacularly successful" for the health insurance industry. As he noted, between May 2009 and May 2017, the stock prices of the five largest investor-owned health insurers -- Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Humana and United -- increased between 387 percent and 748 percent, much more than the Dow Jones average.
The CEOs of those companies have become spectacularly wealthy as shareholder value has skyrocketed. They undoubtedly have to be concerned to hear that a growing number of business leaders are saying it's time to give serious thought to single-payer health care in the United States.
Not long before I left my job in the insurance industry in 2008, a coworker asked our CEO during a company leadership meeting what kept him up at night. He responded with a single word that most of us, I suspect, had to look up. That word was, you guessed it, "disintermediation."
He said he worried that someday a majority of Americans -- and more specifically, a majority of business leaders -- might begin to question the value proposition of insurance companies and reach the conclusion that they are little more than unnecessary middlemen....Truthout
Even Business Leaders Are Realizing Health Insurance Companies Serve No Purpose
Wendell Potter, formerly vice president of communications for Cigna
Considering many large companies self-insure, and use the "insurers" as processors.
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