Acme, Inc. makes all sorts of things, and as you're probably aware, they're the main supplier for coyotes looking for that extra edge when trying to catch roadrunners. I'm not entirely sure how coyotes get so much money, and it seems that at least a few of the items Acme sells should be illegal. But their ability to stay in business is very straightforward.
An examplet: Acme has rocket-propelled roller skates for sale. It costs them a certain amount to manufacture rocket-propelled roller skates, and they sell them to the coyotes for a higher price. Probably, given the demo they're serving, a much higher price. Acme's profit, then, is directly tied to the number of products they are able to sell. If they have customers besides coyotes - who apparently don't care if things actually work or not - their ongoing ability to sell their products, and therefore make more profit, is tied to their products' level of quality.
Yes, this is fairly elementary, but stick with me, because an awful lot of people (read: politicians, Village media) seem like they fail to grasp this.
Next lets think of Acme, LLC, which is a web-hosting company. The coyotes have discovered the joys of textured vegetable protein, but since they still have an insatiable desire to capture roadrunners, they've created World of Roadrunner, an online game, which is wildly popular. They need a lot of servers to keep it running, and Acme, LLC, as a tier-3 data center, is able to host all the servers in a secure environment with 99.99999% uptime. They don't sell a product that the coyotes can hold, but a service. Even with this difference, though, the basic business model and motivations are the same. Acme, LLC has to pay a certain amount for bandwidth, electricity, infrastructure like CRACs (air conditioning), UPSs, diesel generators, payroll, etc., and they charge the coyotes a price that's a bit higher than their costs so they can make a profit. Their ability to continue to make this profit is directly tied to the quality of their service - uptime, ability to upgrade servers, all that good stuff.
Now, let's consider Acme Healthcare United, a health insurance company. Coyotes tend to get injured a lot - it used to be things like broken bones, skin grafts for burns, major trauma types of things. Now the coyotes need treatment more for carpal tunnel syndrome, eye injuries, heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other ailments that come from a sedentary, Cheetos-rich lifestyle.
This is where things get different, because the idea behind health insurance is not the same as the idea behind other types of businesses. Health insurance comes from mutual societies - really, they're a type of commune, of socialism. The idea is that a group of people pay into a fund on a regular basis and are then able to draw from the communal fund when they need it. There are no products or services on offer, at least not in the way these are usually considered. And every penny that is taken out of the fund for administrative costs is a penny that is no longer available for the purpose of having the fund in the first place.
So, can you see how having a for-profit health insurance company is by its very nature an unethical enterprise? The "profits" are simply money that is being diverted from its main purpose - not for the running of the fund, which is necessary - but to enrich others. Yes, I'm aware of people purchasing stock in these companies, but A)a well-run health insurance company doesn't need infusions of cash and B)these stockholders expect a greater return on their investment, which simply means more money diverted from purchasing healthcare than they invested in the first place.
Add to this America's ridiculous CEO pay structure - health insurance companies pay their CEOs in the millions per year range, just like other large companies - and it seems clear that a lot of the money Americans spend on health insurance is being diverted from its purpose of purchasing care for members into the pockets of, relatively speaking, a very few people.
That's why we need a public option for health insurance - a government-run health insurance plan that is able to act in the health care market exactly the same way for-profit insurance companies do - which will not divert members' premiums into the pockets of senior executives and stockholders. And the fact that health insurance like this is inherently more efficient than for-profit insurance is why there is so much pushback on this idea. For-profit health insurance companies, and the politicians in their pockets, are terrified of giving everyone in the country the ability to purchase Congress's health insurance (for example). We need to keep up the pressure and not let the only thing that could truly reform our health care system and break profit's stranglehold on it fall by the wayside in the name of "bipartisanship."
