Robert Reich's blog post on December 10,
How a Few Private Health Insurers Are on the Way to Controlling Health Care, was very clear.
And if you think an expanded Medicare is the answer, you're smoking medical marijuana.
With or without the capitulation to the Jowled One (Lieberman), is there anything in this bill to lower costs? An insurance Subsidy? All that does is transfer the cost from the individual to the collective taxpayers (that's all of us). So pay it directly to Big Insurance or have the IRS collect it and transfer it to Big Insurance. It just seems like a delayed payment plan.
I'll jump to the punch line first for people that are time challenged. Without the Public Option, we're doomed to rapidly escalating costs from predatory private insurers.
From the start, opponents of the public option have wanted to portray it as big government preying upon the market, and private insurers as the embodiment of the market. But it's just the reverse. Private insurers are exempt from competition. As a result, they are becoming ever more powerful. And it's not just their economic power that's worrying. It's also their political power, as we've learned over the last ten months. Economic and political power is a potent combination. Without some mechanism forcing private insurers to compete, we're going to end up with a national health care system that's controlled by a handful of very large corporations accountable neither to American voters nor to the market.
Reich believes the Blue Dogs were either scared (that's generous) or bought off (seems most likely).
The public option is dead, killed by a handful of senators from small states who are mostly bought off by Big Insurance and Big Pharma or intimidated by these industries' deep pockets and power to run political ads against them.
So the progressive's compromise to Universal Health Care is dead. But of course, Kucinich prophesied that back in September -- so no one here was surprised. Right?
But we still end up with a system that's based on private insurers that have no incentive whatsoever to control their costs or the costs of pharmaceutical companies and medical providers. If you think the federal employee benefit plan is an answer to this, think again. Its premiums increased nearly 9 percent this year. And if you think an expanded Medicare is the answer, you're smoking medical marijuana. The Senate bill allows an independent commission to hold back Medicare costs only if Medicare spending is rising faster than total health spending. So if health spending is soaring because private insurers have no incentive to control it, we're all out of luck. Medicare explodes as well.
Huh? So even if we get this expanded Medicare for people 55+, insurance rates will continue to march to the sky? And our secret hope that this would be just be the first step to Medicare for all is a fool's hope.
Reich goes on to explain the real problems are
- lack of competition
A system based on private insurers won't control costs because private insurers barely compete against each other.
- a monolith industry exempt from antitrust regulation.
In light of all this, you'd think the insurance industry would be subject to the antitrust laws, so the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission could prevent it from combining into one or two national behemoths that suck every health dollar out of our pockets (as well as the pockets of companies paying part of the cost of their employees' health insurance). But no. Remarkably, the Senate bill still keeps Big Insurance safe from competition by preserving its privileged exemption from the antitrust laws.
Go read the entire post and decide for yourself if the current diluted bill is worth passing.