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Saturday 19 September 2009

…I got an email blast from MoveOn.org this morning inviting me and several million other people in their address book to a set of nationwide rallies to fight the insurance giants. Sure, I’d like to do that—but they’re organizing these rallies in support of the reform proposed by the administration and Congressional Democrats. As I’ve been saying over and over, there’s nothing in these proposals that seriously, or even semi-seriously, cramps the style of the big inscos. Quite the contrary. We’re all going to be forced to carry insurance, should this legislation pass, meaning buy it from the insurance companies. If you’re sort of poor, the gov will subsidize your purchase. They won’t be able to drop people for pre-existing conditions, but they will be able to force them to pay through the nose for crummy policies. Doesn’t MoveOn know this? Don’t they know that over the last three months Aetna’s stock has gone up 30%, about twice as much as the broad market? Is MoveOn so in thrall to the Democrats that they haven’t bothered to scrutinize the proposals? Or have they, and they don’t care? In other words, are they naïve or devious? For a lot of liberals, it all seems to have come down to the so-called public option: will the reform create a public entity to compete with the private insurers? Never mind that in the unlikely event the public option were to happen, it would be so crippled as to be meaningless. But what about the rest of the scheme? What about the noxious habits of the insurance companies, like denying a quarter or a third of the claims that patients file? That’s likely to continue unabated. I think we may be better off if these reform schemes fail and we have time to organize to press for something better. Doug Henwood

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