The healthcare reform moves now to the Senate and concerns over costs of legislation now increases. Supporters saying that affordable health insurance is within reach are now drastically decreasing. They have a point there because a lot of health care companies which are Standard and Poor’s 500 have tripled their income on average in the last 12 years.

This is during a 10-year period that has seen significant losses in most economic sectors. While it makes sense that the industry would be relatively resilient–after all, the necessity of visiting a doctor or hospital doesn’t go away when the economy slumps–healthcare costs have soared since 2000, making health insurance less affordable.

The typical scapegoats for more expensive health plans are the health insurers themselves. There is no doubt that health insurance companies had a profitable decade. The six health insurance companies in the S&P 500 made over $10 billion in profits.

It would seem that these massive profits are standing in the way of affordable health insurance. However, insurance companies are actually one of the least profitable sectors in the healthcare industry. Their profits are less than expected, because sales of health insurance increased almost as much as profits.

So, if the insurance companies are not the main reason of the shortage of affordable health insurance, then who is? Over the past decade, the medical device makers and medical suppliers saw the most improvement. They have increased by 17% and 15% respectively.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical firms doubled their profits, while increasing their margins to nearly 25 percent. All of these industries have been responsible for valuable scientific advances in medicine. On the other hand, they have also resulted in the soaring cost of insurance during the same time frame.

So, what can we do? The healthcare reform bill could help the healthcare industry lower the price of insurance costs because price control is unlikely. If health insurance companies don’t need to pay exorbitant rates then the availability of affordable health insurance will be plentiful and this is for the majority of their services and supplies.

The House of Representatives have passed the healthcare reform bill but has done little help to solve this problem. The significant players for crafting the legislation have been the drug and insurance companies.

Many sectors should share the blame for the increasing amount of insurance premiums. It is somewhat unfair that the insurance companies have been singled out. However, they still made improvements by reducing the administrative expenses.

Partly the fault would be on the consumers. They demand increase in medical care that is usually unnecessary and they disregard the cost. Another solution for this would be price transparency. With this, let’s see if affordable health insurance will still blossom in 2019.

Charles David Rogers is a professional writer who writes articles for Health Insurance New Mexico. He has been producing articles for sites such as this to share his background in health insurance with others.