How Profit is made in Healthcare

The Affordable Care Act mandates that health insurance companies cannot discriminate based on past medical history, as they had frequently in the past. They have therefore begun to use different techniques to avoid signing up "sick" patients.

In a recent review it was found that over 40% of insurance carriers categorized all HIV drugs as "third tier". This creates an extremely high financial burden on these patients and will make them much less likely to choose that company. This type of behavior exists in many other diseases.

The fact that we do not have a public not-for-profit option and the greed of the health insurance industry will continue to allow such loopholes in the ACA to be exploited. It seems that we will need to wait at least until the next presidential election before we see any changes or improvements.