Your clever litle ploy has backfired, TB, because "THIS STUDY" you are now so proudly trotting out to prove (whatever?) has nothing to do with me or anything I said. I've never seen it, or even heard of it, so it can't be influencing me. It's some straw man you are using to try and put words in my mouth.

I worked strictly with your figures, (I didn't even bother to verify your source) and subjected them to the same rule of thumb analysis I would have used with my own numbers. There is nothing but grade school math here, ratios and percentages.

There's a lot of ways you can slice this pie, ratios, fractions, gross and net, relative and absolute, and I've used most of them in my posts. No matter how you do it, by every objective measure, it shows a very profitable industry unrestrained by market forces or competition, which is showing sales and profit growth in both relative and absolute terms while its clients and customers are getting continuously higher prices and cuts in services. I think that's called "a seller's market". The profit margin has gone up, and so have total sales. So the absolute return has increased substantially in a very short period of time. Where are the much-touted economies of scale? The cutthroat competition? The innovation? Aren't profit margins supposed to decrease percentagewise as total sales increase as a result of increased efficiency? All I see is a feeding frenzy.

These people aren't even trying to hold the line on costs and prices, because they don't have to, and it's too profitable. You may choose to phrase it in the most innocuous way possible, The profit margin went from 3 to 5 percent. But Tom, the profit increased by 1.64 BILLION dollars in just two years, while premiums went up and services were degraded. And that's just one company I've never even heard of, probably selected because it's impact was minimal.

It's that simple.