this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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Pharmaceutical companies, like Pfizer, are often at odds with health insurance companies, like UHC. Like they really don't like each other, because they're both fighting for the same pie in a zero sum situation. Pharmaceutical companies want to charge more for medicine and insurance companies want to pay less. I'm not defending either company or industry, but I really don't think this is as nefarious as Klippenstein is trying to make it out to be
It was recently in the news that the CEO of Pfizer was at Mar a Lago kissing Trump's ass to try to get him to do away with pharmacy benefit managers, AKA prescription insurance, which really hit insurance stocks.
They have their disagreements but, at the end of the day, big pharma wants the private insurance industry to continue.
Under the ACA, health insurance companies are required to spend 80% of premiums on purchasing healthcare. That means they can only increase profits by growing market share, or by spending more on healthcare. There are also provisions that insurance companies have to provide public justification if rates go up more than 15% in a year. The result of all this is that health insurance wants the cost of providing healthcare to rise at just under that 15% per year mark. Sure enough, that's almost exactly what's been happening since the ACA passed.
When big pharma wants to grow their incomes faster than the 15% average, that causes pain for insurance companies who either push back at pharma, or try to make up the difference with other healthcare providers. That's as far as the adversarial relationship tends to go.
Ultimately they are all majority controlled by the same financial institutions, so that tends to keep conflicts at a low simmer. The CEOs are competing for bonuses, but the boards rarely care much which company the profits come from.