Are we talking about the same issue?
I am talking about the difference between buying a policy as an individual and buying it as part of a “recognized group” (usually a place of employment).
In both cases it involves buying from an insurance company.
But you said “greater for an individual than an insurance company”, so I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing here.
Apparently not. In my experience, individual insurance is MUCH cheaper than group insurance. But the reason is that the insurance company can pick and choose individual insurees, but they have to insure anyone a company hires on a group plan. Thus the insurance company has less risk with an individual policy than with a group plan. Which apparently more than offsets the increased selling costs. Plus an insurance company can probably trample an individual insuree, whereas the more grief they give a group insuree, the more likely they will lose the group plan.
What I was talking about is the difference in what the medical provider charges. Someone threw up an example of $75 to an individual vs $40 to an insurance company. But it can be far worse than that. I've seen things like $5000 outpatient surgery to an individual knocked down to $700 to an insurance company. There's no way selling costs justify that difference.
In my opinion, that difference in prices ought to be prosecutable under the current anti-trust laws. But it's up to the executive branch to prosecute and they won't.