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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (135104)	3/27/2010 8:33:08 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543182

"But, of course, our insurance companies aren't subject to federal antitrust restrictions. One area where collaboration was possible. Fixing that had supporters on both sides." Fixing that had people on both sides mouthing support. Actually legislating to remove that exemption seems, thus far, to be less popular. With regard to the public option, as I recall, the opponents of including a public option weren't going to be happy with it regardless of whether it had provisions in it prohibiting public subsidies. Evidently their view of government efficiency versus private efficiency is that government cannot compete even with the overhead advantage that a non-profit, large scale, government run public option provider would have enjoyed. Oddly enough, I suspect they were right but not because of government inefficiencies. My worry was that the insurance industry would game the system and saddle the public option insurer with high risk, high expense insureds. There is, of course, no reason for that to have to happen but there are plenty of historical reasons to believe it would have happened. None of it matters in the long run. If insurance costs keep rising we'll revisit public option and single payer and we'll certainly begin looking for ways to limit the very lucrative, very marginal medical procedures that are giving us little or no bang for our buck. That's when grandma will get some better information to help her decide whether she wants to spend her last days eliminating in a bed pan among strangers in a spartan room, in pain, with machines hooked up to her veins. And yes, the notion that the underlying problem with insurance companies rescinding policies when their insureds got sick was, indeed, profit. There has to be a motive when a longstanding, contract breaching practice is put in place industry wide and that motive wasn't that insurance companies hate sick people. It was ______. (Please fill in the blank here and if the answer isn't "profit" then please let the world know because, as I've said before, we may have to rewrite the economic and sociology texts. It amazes me that you cannot seem to grasp that concept. Ed