Consolidation in the Health Insurance Industry Contributes Little to Rising Premiums

摘要

The private health insurance industry provides coverage to over 160 million non-elderly Americans, gathering $850 billion in annual premiums. These figures do not include publicly-insured individuals whose coverage is outsourced to private insurers, or the elderly who purchase private supplemental insurance. The annual growth in private health insurance premiums has exceeded the annual growth in worker earnings in all but one of the last 20 years, in most years by a wide margin.