Real Competition Can Stop Health Insurance Gouging

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama is all for the congressional effort
to produce health-care reform -- as long as the legislation we end up
with doesn't contain any actual reform.

Indeed, the senator gets fainting spells at the mere mention of
Barack Obama's proposed reforms, gasping that they add up to socialized
health care. He recently stammered that the president's plan would
destroy "the best health care system the world has ever known."

Huh? This guy puts the "dumb" in dumbfounding. Maybe by "finest" he
meant the most expensive, for it surely is that. But the best? Hardly.
The quality of our care ranks 37th in the world -- only one notch better
than Slovenia!

But perhaps it's not Shelby's fault that he's so out of touch with
the unpleasant reality that most Americans face when they're sick and
have to cope with the costly, bureaucratic, uncaring system now run by
a handful of insurance corporations. After all, he's been in Congress
for 30 years, so he and his family have long been receiving
platinum-level coverage courtesy of us taxpayers. Maybe he assumes
everyone gets the same. You see, since Shelby already gets excellent
socialized health care, of course he thinks it's the finest.

Obama's proposed reform is not so bold as to offer you and me the
same sweet deal that our congress-critters get, but it does include one
provision to help us escape the untender mercies of insurance
profiteers. Called the "public option," it creates a publicly run
insurance plan as an alternative to the costly, mingy, inscrutable
policies shoved at us by the big, monopolistic insurers.

The beauty of this option is that it gives everyone a real choice.
Since the public insurance plan doesn't rake off a profit, doesn't need
a massive marketing budget, won't pay multimillion-dollar executive
salaries and won't have an army of backroom agents working to deny
payment for treatments our doctors prescribe, it will offer better
coverage at a cheaper price than the pampered private corporations
presently offer.

This public policy would provide a competitive balance on the price and quality of coverage available to us consumers.

The choice is up to us, for the public option is -- after all --
optional. If you're happy to have an insurance corporation be your
health-care broker, go with that. If not, you can consider purchasing
the public policy.

This makes so much sense that the insurers, drug makers, hospitals,
nursing homes and other big players in the health-care industry
carefully pondered how the public option would be so beneficial to the
people -- then, in unison, the industry issued its measured response:
"Shhrrriiieeekkk! Nooooooooo!! Yikes-Yikes-Yikes!!!"

Insurance executives have largely divvied up the national
health-insurance market so they've been able to avoid competing against
each other (the American Medical Association's 2008 study of health
insurance markets in 314 U.S. cities found that 94 percent of them are
"highly concentrated"). So they are apoplectic at the prospect of
having a genuine price-and-quality competitor in every U.S. market.

Thus, the industry is going all-out to kill the public option -- not
by defeating it in the marketplace, but by unleashing its army of
Washington lobbyists to get Congress to kill it. Instead of bullets,
they're firing millions of dollars in campaign donations at our
lawmakers. The question is whether the industry's political cash and
lobbying clout will induce enough senators and representatives to vote
against the American people -- 72 percent of whom tell pollsters they
want the public option included in the reform package.

To learn more and to support real consumer choice in health insurance, contact: democracyforamerica.com.