The secret health insurance companies don’t want you to know

ByDr. Daniel Thomas, DO, MS
Have you ever wondered why health insurance companies so readily cover surgery or expensive drug-based treatment? Wouldn’t common-sense dictate that, if there were less expensive, non-surgical or non-drug approaches to reversing chronic disease, they would jump all over it? Imagine how much money the insurance companies would save if there were permanent solutions to conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. Forget about what’s best for the patient for the moment. Why in the world aren’t they interested in saving money? Two articles from the Wall Street Journal actually shed light on this (2/25/09 and 2/1/10).

This may be a hard to believe (it was for me, at first): Insurance companies make money on the claims they pay out. The more they pay out in claims, the more they can charge in premiums, and the wider their profit-margin becomes. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Insurers generally earn a profit by charging a premium on claims they pay, so they don’t necessary have an incentive to crack down on spending.” In others words, the more an insurance company spends on claims, the easier it is for them to justify to government regulators their never-ending premium increases. Conversely, if less money is spent on claims, insurance companies would be pressured to lower premiums, and their profit-margins would shrink.

Insurance companies be damned, the only way out of this mess is to become educated on how to reverse disease, and slow the aging process so you can live longer and in excellent health.

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