Gutting the Health Care Plan: The Scorpion and the Congress

Huffington Post by Paul Loeb | Jun. 8, 2009 (Opinion)

The Clintons assumed the insurance companies were too powerful to confront, so the plan had to go along with them. But once they assumed any bill had to get the companies' approval, no plan could work, because it had to build in ways for the companies to maintain their profit margins and the immensely wasteful overhead they spend on advertising, processing claims, and turning down as many sick people as they can. Their approach also creates corollary ... Full Story »

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by Dwight Rousu - Jun. 8, 2009

Loeb looks at the health care bill debacle forming up, and finds parallels with the Clinton attempt. He sees that insurance companies killed the Clinton plan, and are ready to kill the Obama plan.

Publicly financed elections would reduce the influence of the big insurance corporations. Publicly financed elections are good for your health.

Because we’ve accepted the premise that the private insurance companies have to be included, we’re now starting to consider including a public option only if it includes poison pills that will doom it to fail, like requiring it be triggered by a set of exceedingly unlikely circumstances deferred to the indefinite future. Or requiring it to play by rules so onerous that it can’t achieve its straightforward cost savings. Or turning it over to the states, so Big Pharma and Big Insurance interests can simply, as Robert Reich warns in one of the best summaries of the game, “buy off legislators and officials as they’ve been doing for years.”

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