411 Insurance

On average, Health Care companies which are in the Standard and Poor’s 500 have experienced a three-fold increase during the last ten years. This occurred in a 10-year period where significant losses were experienced by most in the economic sectors.

Visits to a doctor or to a hospital are ever likely regardless of the status of the economy. On this regard, it makes sense that the healthcare industry would remain in good standing. However, insurance has become less affordable as healthcare costs have soared since 2000.

Even so, the profits of insurance companies are less than expected due to the similar increase in sales and in profits. It may be hard to believe but the truth is in the healthcare industry, one of the least profitable sectors is the health insurance companies.

During the last ten years, improvements were felt most by medical suppliers and medical device makers. Since 2000, suppliers had 17% profit increase and device makers had 15% increase.

With a nine fold increase in profits, the biggest winners of all were the biotech companies. Pharmaceutical companies, meanwhile, doubled their profits and their margins to nearly 25%.

All these sectors belonging to the health industry have made great contributions to advances in medicine. Consequently, these advances have also contributed to the increasing cost of insurance during the last ten years.

Affordable health insurance will be more plentiful if health insurers don’t need to pay exorbitant rates for the majority of their supplies and services. Unfortunately, the healthcare reform bill recently passed by the House of Representatives does little to remedy this problem.

Putting pressure to insurers and suppliers to cut costs, as a public option, could lead to more affordable healthcare. However, many different factors are present and make such a plan simply difficult to put across. The US economy is made up largely by health care industries, and these are projected to grow as other economic sectors contract such as the car industry.

Partly to blame for demanding increasing and more complex medical care, with no regard of the cost and which may be unnecessary, are health care consumers. Another solution available would be transparency in price. We will all see if this health insurance boom continues ’til 2019.

Charles David Rogers is a professional writer who writes articles for Health Insurance Maine. He has been producing contents for sites such as this to share his background in health insurance with others.

Tags: Health Insurance Maine, Insurance, Maine Health Insurance

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 at 3:53 am and is filed under Insurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.