Blaming the insurance companies strikes me as the political equivalent of yelling at the cashier.
Insurance is one of the oldest industries in the US, which means they have accumulated many (probably well meaning, but ultimately stupid) regulations over the years.
For example, to be taxed as an insurance company (e.g. avoid paying tax on premiums that will partially be paid out in the future), most states assign a maximum profit margin.
That means, in order to make more money as an insurance company, it's perversely in their best interests to increase the cost of medical care as much as possible. Medical care is not like cat bonds that might wipe out your risk pool, so it's just a cashflow game.
That's not to say there isn't any downward pressure. On a day to day basis, individual claimants eat more into that margin than was budgeted, so a company might have to raise rates higher than their competitors (essentially they have some pressure to deny claims), but there is very little systematic pressure to reduce overall costs. Also, marketing budget does not count towards profit, which is why insurance companies are in this rat race of brand advertising to steal customers from each other. With auto insurance, for example, upwards of 40% of your premium is just going out the door as ad spend.
Anyway, I would assign a lot of blame in this perverse incentive scheme to poor regulations.
If I were the one making the decision, I'd change American healthcare with one big thing, modeled on the Japanese system... price controls. Japan's system is more or less like ours, but with one key difference - a government panel sets the prices for all medical goods and services. Providers and insurers have to make their profits within that price structure. This incentivizes both to reduce costs, for the sake of their own profits.
Of course, this would be called radical socialism or some such stupid in America, and Democrats aren't even talking about it (Republicans have no ideas at all on health care). But it's politically a much lower threshold than single-payer (throwing out the whole framework and starting over, basically). And it demonstrably works - Japan's system costs less than half what ours does per capita, with better outcomes.
The motivation of insurance is to keep the cost of treatment less than the income from premiums -- it doesn't have anything to do with how healthy people are.
> the motivation of insurance is to keep the cost of treatment that they cannot avoid liability for less than the income from premiums
Sometimes that aligns with keeping people healthy, but other times that aligns with women not getting routine prenatal screening and thus increasing the infant mortality rate.
What could we do to make this the basis of the system? Without driving doctors away from patients who have bad prognocices?
Unfortunately, they probably won't want to. People frequently change insurance, so the most likely outcome is they'll have to pay for an expensive treatment, but never see the savings.
This is currently playing out for some new expensive new gene therapies.
For the mentioned new gene therapy treatments, people have been asking congress to come up with a new model for how to pay for treatment. Here's a recent opinion piece by a Louisiana Senator where he lists off the proposals he's heard: https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/12/paying-for-coming-genera...
A testament that the demand for healthcare services is not only about health results. Albeit there are grave challenges about the way Kaiser or HMO's have supposedly better health results.
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