Why Your Health Insurer Owning Your Doctor Is a Financial Disaster for You
The Blind Squirrel Finds a Nut
I keep a file. I call it my “blind squirrel finds nut” file. It does not get updated often. But today, Elizabeth Warren earned herself a spot in it.
She posted something that I have been saying for years, just from a completely different angle. Her point was simple: your health insurer should not own your doctor’s office, your pharmacy, and the middleman deciding which prescriptions are covered. That gives one corporation at least four ways to squeeze every penny out of you when you are sick.
She is not wrong. I will say it plainly. She is right.
The Two-Masters Problem
Here is the core issue, and this goes far beyond healthcare. Any profession, and I mean that word carefully, should never serve two masters. A doctor. A lawyer. An accountant. A registered investment advisor. These are not jobs. They are professions. And a profession cannot be owned by a big business, run by private equity, or traded on a public exchange.
The moment you allow that, you have created a system where the professional’s loyalty is split between the patient or client in front of them and the shareholder demanding a return. That conflict never resolves in your favor.
I have been making this exact argument about Wall Street for decades. The repeal of Glass-Steagall was sold to us as a great innovation. Bigger banks, more efficiency, better for everyone. How did that work out? We got the 2008 financial crisis, taxpayer bailouts, and a financial system where your advisor works for the firm, not for you.
Healthcare followed the same playbook. And now we are living with the consequences.
Healthcare Is Eating the Economy
Here is something that does not get talked about enough. When you look at the cumulative job growth in this country, the overwhelming majority of new jobs being created are in healthcare. And a significant portion of those are administrative positions, not doctors, not nurses, not people actually delivering care.
This matters because it tells you exactly what has gone wrong. We have built an enormous administrative apparatus around healthcare. Layers of billing, prior authorization, compliance, and coordination. All of it costs money. All of it gets passed on to you.
- Healthcare jobs now dominate U.S. job creation data
- Most new healthcare jobs are administrative, not clinical
- This bloated structure drives up costs without improving outcomes
- Politicians are reluctant to fix it because those jobs are votes
What Economics Actually Tells Us
If you want to understand why government-run healthcare does not and cannot work the way its proponents promise, go back to Ludwig von Mises. In the 1920s, he dismantled the intellectual foundation of socialism with one devastating argument: without a free market, you have no price discovery. Without price discovery, you have no pricing mechanism. Without a pricing mechanism, there is no rational economic calculation possible.
It is like trying to solve an algebra problem where every variable is a letter and no numbers exist. You cannot do it. The math does not work.
This is precisely what happens in heavily regulated or government-controlled markets. Healthcare is a perfect example. When prices are hidden, mandated, or negotiated behind closed doors between massive corporations and government bureaucracies, the consumer has no power and no information.
The Warren Contradiction
Here is where I have to be honest about the irony. Elizabeth Warren is calling for breaking up big medicine. Fine. I agree with the diagnosis. But Senator Warren was in the Senate when the Affordable Care Act passed. The very consolidation she is now railing against accelerated under policies she supported.
You do not get to light the fire and then complain about the smoke.
The solution is not more government control of healthcare. The solution is genuine free market competition, price transparency, and the removal of the regulatory and corporate structures that have turned medicine into a profit extraction system at the patient’s expense.
Professions need to serve their clients. Period. When they serve shareholders first, everybody loses.
