Health insurance: burn it down, start again

Where US healthcare is broken: health insurance industry

If we somehow manage to fix US healthcare and raise our standards to match the rest of the civilized world, we will first have to smash what we have today. Not all of it: just the health insurance industry.

I worked for a couple of years next door to Blue Shield corporate offices in San Francisco, and later for a few years at Pandora across the street from Kaiser Permanente corporate offices in Oakland. Watching the people trundle into work, and when they spill out at lunchtime to get a sandwich or run an errand, you can see that these people are not the A team. They don’t look or sound like Salesforce or Google employees, or even Blackrock Global Investors employees. Apologies for being so judgemental, but these pudgy little church mice have never invented anything, and they’re not breaking down walls to solve complex problems with breakthrough ideas. Health insurance corporate office buildings are a wasteland of professional mediocrity. Low-to-medium paid administration workers make long commutes to sit in cubicle farms in a gloomy hierarchical corporate culture, bereft of imagination and talent, where the boss is the only one who can have brilliant ideas or solve problems. This culture is created by an accidental monster that wasn’t supposed to exist in America’s great manifesto of…