health net inc

It has not been a good few weeks for big US health insurance companies.  First was a report (e.g., per the Wall Street Journal) that three companies had been suspended from selling Medicare Advantage plans:

Advocates of laissez faire commercialized health care often trumpet the advantages of competitive markets as a rationale for deregulation.  While there are theoretic, and possibly empiric reasons to think that competitive markets are the optimal way to distribute goods and services, we recently discussed aspects of health care that make it extremely hard for health care markets to be ideally competitive. 

Last week, the Sacramento Business Journal reported on irregularities in how health insurance/ managed care giant Aetna obtained a contract with the US military health plan Tricare:

Aetna Inc. hired a former high-level Tricare employee with access to proprietary information about Health Net Inc.’s performance that could have given Aetna a competitive edge in its bid for a lucrative military health care contract, the U.S.

Government Accountability Office has concluded.

More than two years ago, we noted that Health Net Inc,, the large US health insurer/ for-profit managed care organization, had settled a class-action lawsuit brought by California physicians under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) standard.