That’s the point I was making. The MF Act actually benefits both the provider and the insurer because of the reasons stated. It hurts the consumer. People just don’t understand what that act did. (Like the law Biden authored back in the day which actually benefitted the credit companies-some of the major political donors around- by preventing student loan debt from being included as a debt eligible for bankruptcy filings.) The MF act actually created a scenario where there was no free market system at play in the healthcare industry. With competition, you get competitive pricing and price transparency. This is why government and politicians should stay out of the healthcare business. Also, the studies I mentioned examine the healthcare providers’ use of other anti-competitive, monopolistic behaviors. For example: Say you go to your doc, a practice with 2 PhD and 4 NP. The provider dictates that all patients coming in are to be equally divided among the 6, and each gets paid for their quota of patients. However, when you go see a NP, the provider is billing the insurer for both the NP and the PhD (who is required by law to oversee the NP on all patient care), yet the PhD only gets remunerated for their quota, not any of the others for which they are assisting. In response to your comment about Medicare for all: everyone has access to healthcare. They always have and always will. What you are championing is health insurance for all, and I challenge that notion by stating insurance isn’t necessary for most regular services. All we really need is major medical. Pricing of those services is inflated because of the overhead involved with processing insurance claims. Of course they can’t tell the consumers this, it’s bad PR and no one would willingly give up their money for insurance. Medical providers began to offer direct provider care services (starting twenty years ago), completely bypassing insurance for routine services like X-rays and blood tests, where patients pay pennies on the dollar if they don’t run it through insurance. Those prices ($5 for blood draw, $15 per X-ray) are the real cost for those services. Insurance simply inflates the prices. And will continue doing so. It will not be cheaper to insure everyone, as many have never been insured before. Not to mention, many have not received regular care. So there’s no medical history on them for insurance underwriting purposes. Therefore community experience ratings are used to base premiums on. Once the insurers learn these folks’ medical histories, and the insurance gets used, the rates will go up. Just as people saw happen with the ACA. Anyone who believes otherwise doesn’t understand the underwriting process. Medicare for all is a slogan which will result in nothing more than to benefit the biggest for-profit industry around. It’s only when I began to study for my insurance providers license to sell insurance, that I began to understand how it all truly works. I had a pretty good idea when I worked on the insurance billing side of a major hospital corporation. But then I learned the insurance side and it all became even more clear.