The End of Health Insurance Companies

Here’s a bold prediction for the new year. By 2020, the American health insurance industry will be extinct. Insurance companies will be replaced by accountable care organizations — groups of doctors, hospitals and other health care providers who come together to provide the full range of medical care for patients.

Already, most insurance companies barely function as insurers. Most non-elderly Americans — or 60 percent of Americans with employer-provided health insurance — work for companies that are self-insured. In these cases it is the employer, not the insurance company, that assumes most of the risk of paying for the medical care of employees and their families. All that insurance companies do is process billing claims...

But thanks to the accountable care organizations provided for by the health care reform act, a new system is on its way, one that will make insurance companies unnecessary. Accountable care organizations will increase coordination of patient’s care and shift the focus of medicine away from treating sickness and toward keeping people healthy...