Last week I took the briefest of looks at the health insurance market and how this controversial empire is carved up amongst the top five power players: Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Kaiser, and United. Now I want to spend the next few blogs going in depth on these carriers, taking a careful look at them one-by-one.

But where to start?

My first thought was to go from smallest to largest, but how do you define the size of a carrier? Is it by premiums collected (Kaiser)? Lives covered (Cigna)? Commissions paid out (United)? Total policies (also Kaiser)?

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