Are you asserting that profit makes it worse, and removing profit makes it better, or only implying that your not arguing against the removal of profit.
The latter. I was trying to communicate that I wasn't looking into getting into a debate about profit so let's not go there. What I was doing, instead, was addressing what I consider to be a problem solving flaw.
Solving problems works best when you first correctly identify the problem. Mostly folks just dredge up all the standard bugaboos like profit. That wasn't the first time that I saw profit claimed as the root of that problem although I didn't realize that it had been crowned as the official structural flaw.
That profit is the singular structural flaw it falsifiable. Like I said, if the key flaw were profit, then making the for-profit insurance companies non-profit would solve the problem. But people who claim that profit is the problem don't offer that solution. It clearly won't work. Non-profits also have motivation to pull the rug out from under policy holders. If that won't work, you are left with only one possibility--that you have incorrectly defined the problem.
So, then, what is the underlying problem that triggers the phenomenon that triggered the discussion. I would suggest that price competition is a much better candidate for fundamental "structural flaw" than is profit. If that's the case, then one of John's "two only-way outs," single-payer, would solve it. The other one, "very tight regulation of the industry," wouldn't. So you have only a fifty-fifty chance of fixing the problem. If you, OTOH, define the "structural flaw" as price competition, you can see that regulation won't do the job. But "very tight" enforcement would.
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