Opinion: Taking insurance companies out of health care

Former CIGNA executive-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter is writing about the health care industry and the ongoing battle for health reform for the Center for Public Integrity.

There are many Americans who are beginning to question the contributions big insurance companies make to our health care system. And I’m not just talking about lefty advocates of a single-payer system. Corporate executives are also wondering why we need the big insurers and whether higher-quality and more cost-effective care could be provided to employees if they didn’t have to deal with health insurers at all.

I wrote a few months back that my former CEO at Cigna once said that what kept him up at night was the possibility that Americans — business leaders in particular — would ultimately conclude that insurers were an unnecessary expense. He used the term “disintermediation,” a fancy word that means “cutting out the middle man.”

News out of Seattle this summer undoubtedly has caused the big insurance CEOs to lose more than a bit of sleep. Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company and one of the Seattle area’s largest employers, announced that it has decided to forego the services of an insurance company and to contract directly with two of the Northwest’s largest hospital systems to provide care to its 27,000 employees and 3,000 retirees in the region.

See the complete story at CT News Junkie.