Who are the biggest companies in America?

[longknife]

Google?

Amazon?

ExxonMobil?

Citi bank?

Would you believe that 3 of the top ten are UnitedHealth, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen?

Never heard of them?

Add CVS-Caremark at #8 and 4 of the biggest 10 are all healthcare oriented and constitute 18% of our gross domestic product.

Nobody should be shocked to learn that the health care industry is enormously profitable and generates mountains of paperwork for middlemen to process. Americans know that intuitively from experience. The amazing thing is the sheer size of the middleman industry and the commanding position these firms now hold in our economy. UnitedHealth is just a hair smaller than Amazon; McKesson is bigger than Wells Fargo and Boeing combined. And these companies enjoy all the outsize political clout that goes with their status as big business—one among scores of reasons that meaningful health care reform gets virtually no traction in Washington.

Got that? They don’t provide healthcare of even produce the medicines used to treat patients. They’re middlemen.

So, the mext time you look at your medical bill, try to figure out how much is the doctor charging for his individual skills as opposed to all the paperwork and other stuff. For some details, go to The New Behemoths of Health Care Bureaucracy

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

Google?

Amazon?

ExxonMobil?

Citi bank?

Would you believe that 3 of the top ten are UnitedHealth, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen?

Never heard of them?

Add CVS-Caremark at #8 and 4 of the biggest 10 are all healthcare oriented and constitute 18% of our gross domestic product.

Nobody should be shocked to learn that the health care industry is enormously profitable and generates mountains of paperwork for middlemen to process. Americans know that intuitively from experience. The amazing thing is the sheer size of the middleman industry and the commanding position these firms now hold in our economy. UnitedHealth is just a hair smaller than Amazon; McKesson is bigger than Wells Fargo and Boeing combined. And these companies enjoy all the outsize political clout that goes with their status as big business—one among scores of reasons that meaningful health care reform gets virtually no traction in Washington.

Got that? They don’t provide healthcare of even produce the medicines used to treat patients. They’re middlemen.

So, the mext time you look at your medical bill, try to figure out how much is the doctor charging for his individual skills as opposed to all the paperwork and other stuff. For some details, go to The New Behemoths of Health Care Bureaucracy

3 of the top ten are UnitedHealth, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen?

OK.

Nobody should be shocked to learn that the health care industry is enormously profitable

AmerisourceBergen, market cap $18 billion, net income this year, $855 million, last year, $1.66 billion.
UnitedHealth, market cap $269 billion, net income last year, $12 billion, the year before, $10.6 billion.
McKesson, market cap $26 billion, net income this year, $34 million, last year, $67 million.

2 out of 3, meh.