I may be completely wrong, but I understand in the US normally people have health care through their employer? so they are not themselves paying the insurer, and cannot change insurer.
If this is the case, then it is no wonder the insurer has no particular care for them. It is the power of the consumer to change provider which gives them influence over the provider.
This is the case, and is, IMO, the central problem with American healthcare. Folks in both political parties argue for or against socialized healthcare, and ignore that a huge amount of the problems could be solved by having an actual free market.
My opinion is that providing healthcare as a benefit should be banned. Employees who have healthcare today should be provided the amount the employer would have spent on health care in wages/salary. The fine details are hard to work out, but I think it is a good starting point.
I agree, an important component though is that insurance premiums are pretax, so you’d need to expand HSAs to be large enough to pay insurance premiums.
> so you’d need to expand HSAs to be large enough to pay insurance premiums
I don't think that's the problem so much as 1) IIRC you simply can't use them for premiums in the first place and 2) you need a high deductible plan to be eligible for an HSA in the first place
If this is the case, then it is no wonder the insurer has no particular care for them. It is the power of the consumer to change provider which gives them influence over the provider.