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blue bits. red rocks.
Sunday 27 September 2009

Everyone knows health insurance cannot continue to operate as it does. When you ask an American if they want to keep their health insurance, they’ll say yes…but that smile on their face is actually a rictus. Only people on defined benefit programs are really happy, and those things haven’t been offered since 401Ks became the thing to do. Worse for the insurers, none of the other industries that pay for politicians is defending it. For well over a decade there’s been an annual ritual of reviewing and renewing your employer-provided health insurance. You find your deductable went up this year, your share of the premium went up last year and this new paper is talking about the co-pay. And all the while your employer’s payments are going up too. You as a human may feel you must absorb any rate increases that befall you but when a corporation finds health insurance benefits too expensive to provide they can simply stop doing so. The first public corporation that does this will see a spike in its stock price, which would start the general abandonment of employer-provided health insurance. Yes, it would almost certainly happen given an effective public insurance option. When the health insurance industry’s politicians say if we create a a public insurance plan, everyone will be forced to join it, this is what they are talking about. But it would also almost certainly happen if, as the Republicans would prefer, no regulatory change is made. In either case the only way that can happen in our system is if employers decide en masse to stop providing health care coverage, and in neither case is the decision yours. The decision belongs to the medical insurance industry’s customers…Corporate America, with its non-human priorities. The decision you face is, will your government do what it can to protect you, or to protect the health insurance industry? Prometheus 6

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