Jamie Court: Mandatory health care won't protect consumers. (An insurance analyst concurs with him. They also want subsidies.) Also, How Hillary Sold Out to Big Insurance and Big Pharma

Mr. Court, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, is someone I trust to evaluate the issues without equivocation, doublespeak, and the blather with which mainstream, and industry sources hide the truth.

Fair Use Excerpt (for educational purposes) Marketplace report "Mandatory health care won't curb costs ":

Jamie Court: What do Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hillary Clinton all have in common? They all support the government forcing the middle class to buy a private health insurance policy -- but none want to limit how much insurers can charge or spend.

And that's the problem. Mandatory private health insurance proposals are all stick and no carrot.

The average health insurance premium for a family of four is just over 12 grand per year. What middle-class family making, say, 60,000 bucks per year can afford that bill?

What we need is the carrot of affordable health care. That means government standardizing charges by insurers, doctors, hospitals and drug companies. No more $6 Tylenol in the hospital.

The reason health insurance is so unaffordable today is that no one is watching the costs. With standardization, insurance would be cheaper and people would want to buy it -- not have to because the government is threatening them with a tax penalty.

Oh wait, I can hear the plaintive cry of the free market. You can't tell a doctor, insurer, hospital or drug company what's reasonable to charge. That's socialism. Well, how reasonable then is it to tell every American you have to buy a product whose cost is obscene if you want to be a U.S. citizen? Isn't that corporate socialism?

Mandatory health insurance is a government bailout of a free market that's failed its customers. Fewer people and employers are buying private health insurance because it costs so much more and delivers so little.

So rather than let customers demand a new and better product, politicians are forcing us to buy it. Whatever happened to creative destruction?

There's a business plan of course. Mitt, Arnold and Hillary each received six or seven-figure campaign contributions from the insurance industry. The plan is insurers send the bill and we have to pay it.

Jamie Court is president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights.

A Newsweek report reprinted at HealthNewsDigest.com "How Hillary Won Over the Health-Care Industry " shows how Hillary made very nice with insurance industry and doctors giving them big assurances that they could extract millions more from Americans with her enforced health insurance plan without being constrained to give up their freedom to charge more whenever they want, and then got big bucks for her presidential run.  

The report notes that Hillary got money from big insurance because it was presumed that Democrats might win this year, and she changed her proposals to ones that the industry just loves.   It also says that the lobbyists for "American Health Insurance Plans, the health-insurance industry trade group, ... are in constant contact with Clinton’s staff".

Not only does the health insurance industry intend to make out big from Hillary's health care plan, but also doctors and Big Pharma are jumping on board.  Gee, I wonder what that would mean?

Ezra Klein writes at the Los Angeles Times in "Not-their-fault insurers" in favor of giving the health insurance industry some subsidies to cover our sorry American butts under a plan like Clinton's because mandatory universal health insurance won't be enough to lower prices and keep insurance from dumping sick people.  Mr. Klein notes that either the taxpayers or industry itself can give subsidies to health insurers.  Now you know that the insurance industry is not going to do that itself, not when if they have the president in their pocket.  That means you and I "Taxpayer".

tags: hillary  clinton  health insurance industry  lobbyists  jamie court  2008 presidential election  2008 presidential primary  health insurance  

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