Senate Democrat Elizabeth Warren and Senate Republican Josh Hawley have just introduced a bipartisan bill aimed at making health care more affordable through breaking up health care conglomerates, reports Caitlin Huey-Burns for CBS News. Unless they are broken up, these conglomerates will continue to have the power to drive up health care prices.
Big health care corporations, such as UnitedHealth and CVS Health, have virtual monopoly-pricing power that they are using in ways that increasingly make health care unaffordable for Americans. This bill attempts to end that power. Senator Warren says, “The only way to make health care more affordable is to break up these health care conglomerates. Our bill would be a monumental step towards ending the stranglehold that corporate giants have on our broken health care system.”
Senator Hawley agrees that large health care corporations are making health care less affordable. “Americans are paying more and more for healthcare while the quality of care gets worse and worse. In their quest to put profits over people, Big Pharma and the insurance companies continue to gobble up every independent healthcare provider and pharmacy they can find. Working Americans deserve better.”
Mega-health care corporations own or control physicians, pharmacies, Pharmacy Benefit Managers, health care clinics and more. The bill would prevent health care companies from owning both the insurance company and a company that determines the price, for example, both providers and insurance companies, insurance companies and PBMs, or pharmacies and PBMs. Some are calling this legislation the Glass-Steagall of health care. Glass-Steagall prevented banks from being both investment banks and commercial banks.
What’s particularly noteworthy about the bill is that it has some teeth! It calls for financial penalties on companies that violate the law and gives the federal government the power to sue companies that violate the law. Of course, the problem remains that these companies have more resources to fight the government than the federal agencies charged with enforcement. And, politics generally gets in the way of penalties when big corporations are involved.
Here’s more from Just Care:
- Ady Barkan’s Legacy: Reclaiming Medicare from insurance corporations
- United Health now controls 1 in 10 physicians
- Bipartisan bill would require big insurers to sell off their PBMs
- UnitedHealth care delays, denies and grows ever bigger
- UnitedHealth misleads public about Medicare Advantage through biased research
