GUTTING THE TROUT….Ezra informs us today that the healthcare insurance industry has blinked. But it’s sort of a Sarah Palin blink:
The big news of the day is that the insurance industry has offered a deal: In return for a mandate in which every American must purchase health care coverage, they will stop refusing to sell insurance to those with preexisting conditions. Some deal. They’re basically saying that if we legislate that every American must purchase insurance coverage, they will sell insurance coverage, at some price, to every American.
Needless to say, this is a deal that every industry in America would love. Take GM, for example. Why bother bailing them out with taxpayer cash? Just pass a law instead mandating that every American has to buy a Chevy, let GM set the price, and they’d be back in business!
Of course, it’s actually worse than that. At least if you mandated car purchases, the car companies would still compete for business by lowering prices. Healthcare companies, conversely, don’t want your business if you have a preexisting condition. Why would they? So they’d actually do just the opposite, jacking up prices steadily to ensure that someone else will end up getting your business if you happen to be a diabetic or have a family history of coronary trouble.
Ezra explains all this in more detail, but for now I’ll just observe that a blink is a blink, even if the deal on the table is patently ridiculous. It means the health insurance industry is scared that we might actually do something in 2009 and they want to be seen as something other than completely obstructionist. That means only one thing: they’ve shown fear, and now it’s time to bore in for the kill and gut them like trouts. Let’s get to it.
