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Beginning of the end for major health insurers
Obamacare will unleash innovation in insurance market, expose irrelevance of the big firms
As I’ve noted previously, my former CEO at Cigna said at a leadership retreat that what kept him up at night was the fear that big health insurance corporations might someday be viewed as unnecessary middlemen, that their “value proposition” would come under scrutiny and found to be wanting. That insurance companies would, to use his term, be disintermediated.
That day has arrived.
One of the things apparent right off the bat is that some of the best deals will be offered by nonprofit health insurers, including the brand new co-op plans that will be available in about half the states.
These plans will be lean and mean. They won’t have the enormous overhead costs of the big for-profit insurance corporations that I used to work for, and they won't have to charge extra for coverage just to satisfy the profit demands of shareholders. They won’t have shareholders.
If you’re wondering why Aetna, Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealth Group, four of the biggest for-profits, are not planning to participate in many of the marketplaces, it’s because they know they cannot be compe ive and still satisfy
Before long both Wall Street and Main Street will catch on to the idea that the big for-profits are bloated Goliaths that can and will be taken down by the new Davids of the insurance world. The value proposition held out by the bigs for years — that their armies of underwriters, marketers and “medical management” specialists are essential — will be blown to smithereens.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/...=publici-email
