Congressional committees heard a lot this month about the devious schemes used by health insurance companies to drop or shortchange sick patients. It was a damning portrait — and one Americans know from painful personal experience — of an industry that all too often puts profits ahead of patients. Full Story »
Posted by Kristin Gorski
This article repeats some of the egregious behaviors of health insurance companies, a fact of their existence for the past several decades. It suggests, without evidence, that there are ways to make the insurance industry more effective in health care delivery, mentioning regulation, compulsion to cover high risk subscribers and the effect of competition from a public plan as primary ways this might be done. The article fails to offer any balance in the form of explanations from the insurance industry as to why they do what they do. It is popular, in a time when the health care system in the country is so defective, to seek to blame one or more players as being responsible. It is easy to do so because there are a variety of bad players. At this point in the debate, however, this is not good government, let alone good journalism.
The problem with the insurance industry is not just that the insurance moguls tend to behave badly. It is that the insurance model is the wrong model for the delivery of health care generally. Fixing the system will not, ultimately, be done by regulating or amending the insurance systems. It will be done by instituting a system that is not based on the insurance model at all.