Hmm, Feeding Them to the Wolves...

"It turns out that my readers think the proper role of insurance companies is to be dismembered, their office towers reduced to rubble, and their executives fed to the wolves."

--Kevin Drum

Actually, I'd like to give insurance company executives the option of being broken on the wheel or impaled before they are fed to the wolves. Still, what all this is about is a proposal a guest blogger is making for health care vouchers--i.e. vouchers issued to all taxpayers so that they can buy private plans. On the surface, this sounds inoffensive, but I do have a fear. Insurance companies like making profits, and the quickest way for them to make profits is to find inventive ways to cut off the poor or the sick. (His idea that companies will climb over each other to serve the unhealthy and destitute sounds comical to me.) However tightly regulated an insurance company may be, they have armies of lawyers and they can jigger their rules or their lists of preferred providers any way they like to keep the working poor and the desperate out. What'll the poor do? Sue?

In the meantime, the insurance companies will lobby to give themselves as many regulatory loopholes as they can slip into omnibus bills. The uninsured become the "effectively" uninsured, costs rise, and eventually the system collapses.

Which brings us back to breaking on the wheel or impaling.