Public Option To Prevent Public Fleecing

Expanding on yesterday's post on Obamacare and how health insurance companies are in the business of making money, not saving lives, Digby finds some truly nasty evidence that there's plenty of money to be made off sick people.

Those of you who are struggling to pay for your generic medicines or wondering why the doctor is charging you a $5.00 co-pay, give some thought to these facts about how our health care dollars are allocated. At the end of this post, there is a list of 23 health companies I found on Forbes.com, what the CEO was paid in 2005, and the average paid to the CEO in the past five years.

Imagine adding vice presidents, Board of Directors, stock holders and the other 200-300 other companies all cashing in on your health to that total at the bottom...

And that total at the bottom for combined average pay of the healthcare insurance company CEOs? 14.7 billion dollars. As the post says, add in all the other execs, board members and all the other companies NOT listed in Forbes, and you suddenly have a very, very clear idea that not only is a public option badly needed to prevent such profiteering, but that putting health insurance companies out of business (the main complaint of the anti-public option folks) doesn't exactly fill one with sympathy.

And hey, we could use that money to you know, pay for health care.

Remember, any insurance claim adjuster's job is to find a way to deny the claim. This is how insurance companies stay in business, by paying less out for claims then they take in by collecting premiums.

In health insurance, when you deny the claim, you either bankrupt or physically harm (up to killing) the policyholder. Keep that in mind when you see Serious Washington Centrists like Tom Daschle say President Obama will have to abandon a public health care option in order to "get the votes".

73% of Americans want it. This should be a no-brainer. And yet everyone in the Village pretends America will never go for a public health care option.

[UPDATE] It's one thing for the GOP to try to use the "60 votes" threshold to kill health care reform. It's entirely another thing for the Blue Dog Democrats to help them.

[UPDATE 2] Daschle's counter plan is a series of regional health care co-ops, which is inane to the point of despair. The whole point of a federal public health care option is the Law of Large Numbers, the more people in the health care plan, the more bargaining power it has. If regional health co-op A has California (the most populous state) , and region B has Minnesota and the Dakotas (among the healthiest states), and region C has Alabama and Mississippi (the most out-of-shape states) then the rates for those public plans for those states are going to differ greatly because of their differing levels of bargaining power. This means the existing health care companies will be more competitive from the start, meaning they have much less impetus to change.

It also means that private insurers can charge more in smaller regional co-op areas. It would be even worse for 50 individual state plans, which would turn into budget nightmares held hostage by state Republicans who will do everything to gut and destroy the plans. Think California, multiply by 50.