The people who decide what treatments and tests are necessary are the doctors, so the marketing for this would have to be "buy our cheap insurance, we deny coverage to more testing and treatments than the other insurers do". Which is obviously not a winning strategy.
If you combine that with the increase in insurer owned clinics and hospitals (which unsurprisingly saw a sharp uptick around the time the ACA came into effect), then the insurance company gets to profit more twice. Once when they jack up the premiums, and a second time when those expenses show up as revenue in their other businesses.
I'm all for giving more power to consumers, but when you have a regulation that creates such a strong incentive for raising premiums, layering more haphazard regulation on top of it isn't going to help.
This works if there are multiple insurance companies competing for business, which would require everyone to be forced to healthcare.gov so there is a simple marketplace with sufficient number of insurance customers so that bad actors have competition.
And from my experience, the best healthcare is provided by Kaiser Permanente, which offers health insurance and healthcare under one company.
Pricing in medicine is jacked up because of low supply of workers (the grunt work is undesireable and doctors take a long time to license as well as residency funding restrictions), and infinite liability and legal costs that have to be priced in. On top of that, medicine is very complex, so you have to pay two or more very highly qualified people to double and triple check things.
Also, healthcare cost increases have slowed drastically since introduction of ACA:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/02/01/5822161...
and especially through unnecessary (and very, very expensive) tests:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/12/23/7874035...
The people who decide what treatments and tests are necessary are the doctors, so the marketing for this would have to be "buy our cheap insurance, we deny coverage to more testing and treatments than the other insurers do". Which is obviously not a winning strategy.
If you combine that with the increase in insurer owned clinics and hospitals (which unsurprisingly saw a sharp uptick around the time the ACA came into effect), then the insurance company gets to profit more twice. Once when they jack up the premiums, and a second time when those expenses show up as revenue in their other businesses.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hospital-management-ad...
I'm all for giving more power to consumers, but when you have a regulation that creates such a strong incentive for raising premiums, layering more haphazard regulation on top of it isn't going to help.