Posted on 10/27/2009 11:12:49 AM PDT by Mobile Vulgus
The Associated Press posted an interesting piece revealing that the health insurance industry is far from the image that Democrats and other leftists want to present. Insurance companies are so often presented as rapacious, fat-cats ripping off all their customers and growing fat on profits. But the AP finds that reality does not quite fit the left-wing image.
In fact, the insurance industry makes far less profits than other industries. As the AP notes, the Hershey chocolate company even has a higher profit margin than health insurers.
Ledgers tell a different reality. Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That's anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.Ooopsie! Looks like the image of the fat-cat insurance company is not so pat as the far left and their Democrat enablers want you to believe...Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans.
Read the rest at Publiusforum.com...
I was a health insurance underwriter once and this doesn’t surprise me at all. The bigger profit was always on the life insurance side, not the health.
Liberals have no choice but to claim outlandish profits on the part of the health insurers because there is no other believable and acceptable place to find the alleged cost savings that will fund their plan. No rational person truly believes that government will run the health system more efficiently than it is now being run, and further restrictions on payments to providers are not politically palatable.
Facts. Liberals hate facts.
True, true.
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