this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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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.