Real Competition In Health Care

So Wonderboy spent an hour or so last night demonizing CEOs in the private sector and calling for more government control of our health care and insurance sector.

Blah blah blah blah.

They say they want more "competition" among insurers, to lower costs for consumers. Their solution? Get the federal government into the business of health insurance as a taxpayer-financed, cooked-books, unfairly-advantaged player.

This is really just about socialism and government control over more of our economy.

Here's what is telling about the liberal Democrat approach to this problem.

If Democrats really wanted more competition in this sector, with their majority in both houses, they could pass a law tomorrow ending state-based insurance regulation and barriers to inter-state health care insurance marketing and provision.

Presto! Every health insurer would be instantly in competition with companies from states to which they may not even be proximal.

Furthermore, the Democrats could also remove all mandates, so that consumers could purchase the items they wished from insurers' menus. That's what would almost certainly occur, once a marketing free-for-all erupted. Why?

Well, the more mandates you have, the fewer variants in policies you'll see. For example, my health insurance varies policies only by deductible. There's no other dimension on which to choose my health insurance. No menu from which to choose, allowing me to cut my costs by tailoring my coverage to my situation.

If I were allowed to customize a health care policy, I wouldn't pay for coverage involving obstetrics, child birth, pre-natal care, or lung cancer, because I won't be having more children and don't smoke. There are probably a host of other lifestyle-related contingent diseases on which I could also save money by declining.

But that's not possible in the current environment. I am forced to "choose" among policies which all cover conditions irrelevant to me.

Now, that's wasteful!

For those with expensive pre-existing conditions, the government could offer a backstop policy, or voucher.

But if competition is really what Wonderboy and the liberals want, they'd get much more competition from legalizing inter-state health insurance and repealing mandates.

Because that's not where our First Rookie and his socialist clan is heading, we know that they aren't truly concerned about health care cost management. Or consumer choice and competition among providers.

No, they simply want to drive the last private health insurers out of business, and control doctors and big pharma, too.

I may be wrong, but I think this is the issue on which the Democrats will lose one House in Congress in the next election, and, then, the White House in 2012. At which point whatever abomination they have passed into law will be repealed by a Republican Congress and President.