Essentially the only reason people have been using private insurance is because government hasn’t gotten around to giving it to them, according to Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on MSNBC yesterday:
“This bill does more harm than good … essentially it requires by force of law tens of millions of people who don’t want to be customers of the private insurance industry, to become customers of that industry, forcing them to write big checks to Aetna and Blue Cross while at the same time providing no competition with those corporations, no means of keeping costs under control.
So what better way to fix this problem than to… well, to force millions of people to be customers of a government insurance industry! In Greenwald’s world, we’re just biding our time until government comes along with a much better solution. But wait! It turns out that government is having a hard time coming up with precisely the perfect scheme he envisioned:
“All of the promises that were allegedly made many of the great virtues such as eliminating … the lifetime cap on insurance or preventing the insurance company from claiming fraud when you it comes time and you get sick and they try and not cover you… those things aren’t even in the Senate bill…”
Greenwald does provide a great truth, however, in noting something the Examiner’s own Tim Carney has been saying for some time now:
“I think that the real concern that what this bill does more than anything else is that it massively increases the profitability of the health insurance industry while providing very little benefit and bolstering many of the systemic problems in the system that Obama said in the first place was what motivated him to want reform.”
Important to note: If you want to make it easier for competition to exist and streamline an industry, government entry into the market does not help. Besides, as Dr. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., noted in his Journal op-ed, government-provided service is not what Greenwald cracks it up to be. Just ask the 17,000 Medicaid patients who are on a waiting list for medical services in Maryland.
