[nineplay]

I'm intrigued by the premise - I have my own large burden of health care costs and my own suspicions about where it is going - but does anyone else find their charts unreadable? I'm trying to parse the first one and I keep trying to put the pieces together. "Health care services" is 60 out of 101bn ... excess profits?

The second one I can hardly start on, "health care services" is a medium circle ( circle size = combined market capitalization ) with the second highest "Aggregate return on invested capital" and in the middle of "median weighted-average cost of capital".

I know its called "the economist" but they usually make their articles readable by people without a econ degree. If I had a suspicious mind ( I do ) I'd think this was deliberate obfuscation.

Also "health care services ... such as hospitals and the system’s true money-makers: insurers, pharmacy-benefit managers and other middlemen taking advantage of its opacity"

That is a lot of different interests bundled together. How can they say insurers are the true money makers when they are not even broken out?