"Big or small, businesses operate on the same principle. Provide goods or services someone wants or needs and make a profit. Pretty simple concept."

Yes Hank, the concept is simple. And that's the problem. Health insurance is a bad fit with the capitalist business model. The business model has nothing to do with promoting or even providing "health." It's strictly about return on investment. Well that and aiding the less than 1%er CEOs, etc. become even richer. Health insurance is a much better fit with a socialist model. Obamacare with a public provider would have been close to the ideal. But insurance corporations for some reason didn't want to compete with a government health public corporation, even though we all know based on what we've heard forever that government businesses are hopelessly inefficient. If that is invariably true, then the insurance industry had(has) nothing to worry about. Yet they made sure there was no public provider in the bill.

By coincidence I joined Group Health when I went to work for the gov't. A lot of people don't like it and refer to it as "group death." So they buy higher cost insurance plans. That's OK; that's personal freedom. I like the GH concept. It's a health cooperative, wherein our premiums are described as "pre-paid" benefits. I haven't found GH doctors, nurses, or other health care professionals to be any less competent than others in the industry, so I'm satisfied with it. And it's a model that delivers quality health care at what appears to be a significantly lower cost than other insurance alternatives here in WA, which may account for it's growth in recent years.