Health insurers turning into who knows what?

Commentary: squeeze on profits will continue to transform the industry

By Wendell Potter, 5:00 am, September 22, 2014 Updated: 5:00 am, September 22, 2014

As I wrote last week, one of the nation’s biggest employers — Boeing — is pioneering a concept in providing health care benefits to its employees that eliminates insurance companies as middlemen.

What Boeing is doing represents a seismic shift in health care financing and delivery that potentially will have more far-reaching effects than Obamacare, primarily because it is coming from the private sector, not the government. It is a shift that the big health insurers have been anticipating and preparing for since long before the Affordable Care Act was enacted.