Arthur Salm: Insurance cos. terrified of public option

They’re terrified, and for good reason. Their goose - the one that’s been laying platinum eggs - is about to be slaughtered.

Should the public option survive in the health-care reform bills now being badmintoned around Congress, insurance companies and their pals the HMOs face catastrophe: Their obscene profits could vanish. The hundreds of billions of dollars skimmed every year from America’s insanely jerry-rigged health-care system are on the verge of being re-routed back into the system itself, and used to provide - you’ll never guess - health care: The 20 to 30 percent of all health-care expenditures that has been going to these insatiably ravenous companies should more than cover the cost of providing care for the almost 50 million Americans who now have none.

And they know that, should the public option, under which the federal government offers health-care coverage, become available, people will sign up in droves, in hordes … en masse; Estimates hover around 120 to 130 million. Almost, but not quite comically, these figures are employed by opponents as arguments against the public option: If we implemented it, why, a lot of people would want it!

As always, for the most clueless, abstracted and purblind assessment of just about anything, go to George Will. And sure enough, he came through again: In the Washington Post he explained that government shouldn’t be allowed to compete against private insurance companies because, well, government would do it so much more cheaply, and that would be - no, really he used this very word - “unfair”:

“Government is incapable of behaving like market-disciplined private insurance. Competition from the public option must be unfair because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and negotiating powers.”

See related from Arthur Salm:

American vs. European health care - Part I

American vs. European health care - Part II

Let’s make the HMO’s disappear

It’s no wonder that these besieged companies are lobbing salvo after salvo of misinformation into the infosphere, and instructing their bought-and-paid-for congressional toadies to fill the air with chaff. After all, they stand to lose, over a period of not that many years, trillions in revenue. Their corporate officers gorge every year on salaries, benefits and stock options worth tens of millions. Of course they’re going to fight, and fight dirty. Of course they’re going to demonize their opponents. Of course they’re going to try to scare the bejabbers out of everyone. With dough like that at stake, what insatiable, conscience-free, greed-headed monster wouldn’t?

Their main fright tactic is the horrific specter of the government making decisions about what kind of health care you’ll receive. There is, as it happens, nothing in the public option plan that remotely suggests such an arrangement; even in countries with national health care, only doctors make those calls. (Even if it were true, and it most certainly is not, which would you prefer - an impartial “bureaucrat” deciding your medical fate, or an insurance company that makes money every time it denies a prescription, a test, a treatment, a hospitalization?)

Another bugaboo being tub-thumped is the one about how the government mishandles everything. Last week, House minority leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) suggested to Americans that if the public option goes through, we could be stuck with a health-care system run as poorly and inefficiently as the Post Office and the DMV. Now, I haven’t been to the DMV for a few years, but the few times I’ve been there and had to wait, it’s hardly been intolerable; the horror show of the various DMVs - which remember, deal with every driver and every vehicle in every state - is largely an urban myth. And, right, the hideous post office, staffed by all those polite, hard-working people - many of them veterans - who will take a letter from my front door and deliver it to a house at the end of a gravel road in Maine for what is now the outrageous fee of 44 cents. Good examples, Congressman. (The outstanding health care that Boehner and his family receive is provided by the government , and except for that ghastly out-of-the-bottle-looking tan, he appears to be pretty fit.)

And, as those of us who have gone head-to-head with an insurance company know, they’re all about compassion, understanding, and efficiency.

One critique of the public option posits that it grades a slippery slope toward Single Payer - a Canadian-style system in which everyone has access to good health care as a right of citizenship, and health-care providers are independent, but receive payment from one source only: The government. (Medicare operates the same way.). The slippery-slope critique is quite possibly valid, because once some people are freed from the tyranny of health care determined by for-profit companies, and no longer face the terrifying prospect of having no health care whatsoever, well, a lot of other people - just about everyone, I suspect - will want in.

Damn right it wouldn’t be fair.

Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 6:51 am and is filed under Local News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.