Even if market failures aren’t inevitable, insurance companies deliberately exacerbate them to increase profits

Yet one of the greatest advantages of a single-payer system — its relatively low administrative costs — has been thrown into sharp relief by problems registering with the new health exchanges. Andwhile Republicans despise the Affordable Care Act despite its conformity with many of their earlier proposals, their proposed changes (other than simple rollback) look complicated, kludgy and costly to administer. The malfunctioning website has magnified problems inherent in coordinating enrollment across many different companies in many different exchanges in cooperation with many different government agencies. The harmonization challenges are orders of magnitude greater than those faced by a single company or a single state, making streamlining difficult. Improved software can do only so much. In theory, competition and choice should increase efficiency. In practice, health insurance companies are able to take advantage of the complexity and uncertainty surrounding health care choices to make comparison shopping very difficult. Lack of clear information about the prices of medical procedures, combined with a proliferation of insurance options whose potential benefits will be strongly affected by unpredictable events (such as being involved in an automobile accident or developing cancer), put consumers in a weak position. The process of negotiating relationships with new health care providers because old ones are “out of network” is physically and emotionally exhausting. Insurance companies benefit from promoting policies that are difficult to understand and make consumers fearful of any change in their coverage. That fear and aversion has spilled over into the transactions required for many people to benefit from the Affordable Care Act.