Almost a year in the making, healthcare insurance giants Anthem (ANTM) and Cigna (CI) have finally struck a deal.

And what a deal, too. Anthem will acquire Cigna for a whopping $48 billion. And with a combined 53 million insured people, the Anthem-Cigna alliance would be the largest health insurer in the United States (second in revenue), behind UnitedHealth Group (UNH) and ahead of the proposed combination of Aetna (AET) and Humana (HUM).

In fact, if both the Cigna and Humana acquisitions are approved, the healthcare insurance industry will quickly consolidate into three giant insurers, which will insure over 40% of all Americans.

So what's driving this bout of consolidation?

Quite simply… you are. You and Obamacare.

The Real Beneficiaries of Obamacare

When Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, critics immediately dubbed it “Obamacare.” But supporters of the law have since adopted that term. And since the Supreme Court has now twice agreed with the Obama administration that the law means exactly the opposite of what Congress wrote, it's more than fair to call it Obamacare.

The primary beneficiaries of Obamacare aren't actually the American people – it's the big insurance companies. Need proof? Anthem, Cigna, UnitedHealth, Aetna, and Humana have all at least doubled over the past five years. And that's compared to an impressive 64% return for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The bottom line is that while the number of insured people has risen significantly – generally a good thing – many of these newly insured aren't actually using their insurance because the deductibles are so high!

You see, these people were required by law to purchase insurance – insurance that had to cover just about anything, even if the customer didn't want or need certain kinds of coverage. But to keep prices down, even after government subsidies, insurance companies were allowed to market plans with very high deductibles.