It's not because of lobbyists.
http://www.postchronicle.com/news/strang…
It's not only fraud and overuse (all of which are very real). It's about all the expensive new technologies that are saving lives every day.
I often hear people (mostly BO) talk about the exponential increase in health care costs since 1950. That is such a bogus argument. Do you want 1950's health care? I don't! In the 50's a diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence. There were no CAT or PET scans. There was no MRI. You were lucky enough to get a diagnosis at all!
Yes, it's all very expensive, but people with Lymphoma, Breast Cancer, Prostrate, and on and on are all being successfully treated and in many cases the cancer is eradicated.
Cancer is just one example. Folks with MS are no longer expected to spend the rest of their years in a wheel chair in a nursing home. The drugs to treat MS are allowing people to live normal productive lives.
I could go on and on but those are the GOOD reasons health care is so high.
Well, it's different for each line of business. Sure, auto insurance, there's a huge fraud component - just like workers comp.
Property insurance, well, we've had a couple of huge hurricane hits over the past few years.
Health insurance, it's all about claims - when $.99 of every claims dollar goes to pay claims, and costs keep skyrocketing . . . even with increased deductibles, it means we're all getting much sicker, or we're overusing the medical system to "get our money's worth" out of it.