Nearly 6 in 10 Americans encountered problems using their health insurance in 2024. A third cannot even figure out what their plan covers. Premiums are rising, choices are shrinking and patients increasingly find themselves battling insurers just to get care their doctors already approved.

Voters are angry, and they want someone to blame.

Democrats have noticed. They are positioning themselves as the party willing to confront “Big Insurance,” particularly the sprawling health care conglomerates that now combine insurance, pharmacy benefit management and physician practices under one corporate roof.

Republicans, meanwhile, have advanced market-based reforms to address vertical integration, but they need to make that case far more clearly. If Democrats seize the issue, they will default to their usual prescription: more regulation, more federal intervention and more government control over health care – the same approach that helped create this mess.

How Obamacare helped create Big Insurance

Today’s sprawling, vertically integrated insurance giants did not emerge by accident. Democratic policy,........

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