Insurance Industry Advocates for Increased Insurance

Whaddya know, the insurance industry wants the US to enact universal health care... routed through the insurance industry:

With Democrats vowing to make healthcare a top priority, the insurance industry Monday unveiled a proposal to extend coverage to nearly 47 million uninsured persons.

The move by America's Health Insurance Plans, which represents companies that provide coverage to more than 200 million people, focused attention on an issue politicians have shied away from for more than a decade [...]

The proposal by the insurance trade group combines elements favored by Democrats with some that Republicans have backed. It calls for providing coverage within three years to all uninsured children, currently numbering about 8 million, and within 10 years to virtually all adults.

The plan would rely on a mixture of expanded federal and state programs and tax credits for workers and their families to purchase private health insurance and pay medical expenses. It would also provide federal grants to states that are trying to expand coverage for their residents.

Basically, the plan is getting everyone to buy health insurance. I wonder why the insurance industry would propose that?

Here's Kevin Drum:

Let me get this straight. The private insurance industry favors a government program that would purchase more private insurance for people, but is opposed to anything that would drive down the cost of insurance or guarantee coverage for people the insurance industry doesn't want to cover. That's quite a plan. Why not just ask for grocery sacks full of unmarked bills instead? [...]

No national healthcare plan that relies primarily on private insurance will ever be able to control costs and provide universal coverage. Conversely, every national healthcare proposal that doesn't rely on private insurance — i.e., all the ones that would work in a reasonably efficient and convenient way — will be fought tooth and nail by the insurance industry. I don't blame the insurance industry for defending its turf, but the fact remains that Democrats will never be able to tackle healthcare properly as long as they depend on insurance industry money. This is not an interest group that's on our side, and Democrats should have figured this out a long time ago.

A for-profit insurance industry is incompatible with relieving health care costs - in fact they want the opposite. The SYSTEM itself is broken, not the amount of people willing to pay into the system. To show you just how much, check out this post by HuffPo blogger Courtney E. Martin:

Polly, a curly-haired 30-year-old from Johnson City, Tennessee, was forced to leave eating disorder treatment when her insurance ran out. She explains, "Here I was thinking, It's okay, I'm over the laxatives, I haven't had one in almost three months. But I go outside of Renfrew (Treatment Center) and I wanted them immediately."

Before the rise of cost-conscious, managed-care insurance, the average stay at Renfrew was seven to nine weeks; today the usual stay is only two to four. A recent survey by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders and Glamour magazine of 109 top eating disorder experts in the nation found 100 percent believed some of their patients suffered relapses in their conditions as a direct or indirect consequence of coverage limits.

This phenomenon was captured on film over and over during the course of THIN. Women just beginning to internalize their treatment, just beginning to be honest about their pasts and their problems, just beginning to make healthy, self-motivated choices are yanked from the safety of the Renfrew Center before any of these changes can be actualized. It is as if they punished for taking the first steps in the process of healing.

And what's worse, this approach isn't even saving the insurance companies money. Dr. Janell Mensinger, an expert in eating disorders, explains, "The sad thing about this situation, which happens all of the time, is that everyone gets hurt in the end. The harm to the patient is obvious, but there is harm and financial burden to the system as well a result of such ignorance. The research is clear that the longer the individual has the disease, the more difficult and expensive it is to recover."

Read the whole thing. Any organization primarily concerned with making money is not going to make health care decisions in the interests of their consumers, but in the interests of their bottom line. There's no such thing as "universal" health insurance when it's truncated by cost-cutting concerns. The whole system needs to be upended.