The Blame Game
December 3rd, 2007 by Peter SudermanJohn Edwards is telling people that if not for health insurance lobbyists, we’d all have universal health care. “We need to take away their power!” he says.
Too bad HMOs were in favor of S-CHIP, the biggest attempt to expand the government’s health-care rolls in recent history. As Tim Carney recently reported in the DC Examiner:
For the HMOs, what could be better than a customer who is spending someone else’s money? If Congress spends more money on SCHIP and states are scrambling to enroll more families, then HMOs get even more of these customers.
Not that I expect this will stop Edwards from continuing to blame big companies in hopes of riling up the populist base.
December 5th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
This is a pretty weak argument. Edwards is still right that HMOs are a problem. These insurance companies are publicly-traded, for-profit entities. Their goal is to meet their own internal and analyst projections on a quarterly basis. In essence, their core customers are shareholders in the companies, not the patients themselves. As a result, the goals of these insurance companies are pretty simple: provide the least possible amount of services for the most possible amount of money. That’s how the market works.
Now, they don’t need to apologize for that. Again, that’s how the free market works and should work. The problem is that the market model doesn’t work particularly well at providing public services. And health care costs in America are so high right now as to have devastating effects on middle-class Americans. Because the Insurance industry needs to operate on a for-profit quarterly model, the industry is actively encouraged to refuse as much coverage as they possibly can. Doing so is not in the public interest. Government needs to step in to protect the public, not protect a free-market ideology.
And for those of you out there who think less regulation is the answer, not more, I can only say this: When have you ever known human beings to compete for money and not attempt to cheat? Common sense dictates that there have to be mechanisms in place to catch cheaters and hold them accountable.
For the record, I’m not an Edwards supporter and am an Independent whose voted for members of both parties in the past several elections.