The Economist
Published13 Jul 2024, 03:29 PM IST
(Image: The Economist)
ON OCTOBER 4TH more than 75,000 employees of Kaiser Permanente, a large health-care chain, began a three-day strike. The walkout was the biggest in the history of America’s health sector, and called attention to the staffing shortages plaguing the country’s hospitals and clinics. In the same week ten drugmakers said they would negotiate medicine prices with Medicare, the public health-care system for the elderly, following legislation which all but forced them to. It will be the first time that companies have haggled over prices with the government.
These events are symptoms of deeper malaise in America’s dysfunctional health-care system. The country spends about $4.3trn a year on keeping citizens in good nick. That is equivalent to 17% of GDP, twice as much as the average in other rich economies. And yet American adults live shorter lives and American infants die more often than in similarly affluent places. Pharmaceutical firms and hospitals attract much of the public ire for the inflated costs. Much less attention is paid to a small number of middlemen who extract far bigger rents from the system’s complexity.
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Over the past decade these firms have quietly increased their presence in America’s vast health-care industry (see chart). They do not make drugs and have not, until recently, treated patients. They are the intermediaries—insurers, chemists, drug distributors and pharmacy-benefit managers (PBMs)—sitting between patients and their treatments. In 2022 the combined revenue of the nine biggest middlemen—call them big health—equated to nearly 45% of America’s health-care bill, up from 25% in 2013. Big health accounts for eight of the top 25 companies by revenue in the S&P 500 index of America’s leading stocks, compared with four for big tech and none for big pharma.
(Image: The Economist)
Big health began as a constellation of oligopolies. Four private health insurers account for 50% of all enrolments. The biggest, UnitedHealth Group, made $324bn in revenues last year, behind only Walmart, Amazon, Apple and ExxonMobil, and $25bn in pre-tax profit. Its 151m customers represent nearly half of all Americans. Its market capitalisation has doubled in the past five years, to $486bn, making it America’s 12th-most-valuable company. Four pharmacy giants generate 60% of America’s drug-dispensing revenues. The mightiest of them, CVS Health, alone made up a quarter of all pharmacy sales. Just three PBMs handled 80% of all prescription claims. And a whopping 92% of all drugs flow through three wholesalers.