In say about 20 years, there will be only 2-3 dominate players in every industry as capitalism has a natural tendency to wipe out competition in order to extract the ultimate goal, monopoly profits. Monopoly Money Our good friend Senator Blanche Lincoln thinks it's very dangerous for the insurance companies to have to compete with a public plan option: âOne of our biggest concerns is that it doesnât need to be a government plan that usurps that ability to compete in the marketplace, which Iâm concerned that a totally government-run option would do,â she said. Right. It's competition in the marketplace that makes this country great. Like the competition they have in Lincoln's state of Arkansas, for instance: The Justice Department considers an industry to be âhighly concentratedâ if one company has 42 percent of the market. In Arkansas â Senator Lincoln should take note â Blue Cross Blue Shield has 75 percent of the market. If you take government self-insurance plans out of the equation, it's higher. The state ranks as the ninth most concentrated in the country. Is it any wonder that insurance premiums have risen five times as fast as wages? Introducing a public plan option that individuals and businesses could choose instead of Blue Cross would be very detrimental to Blue Cross, that's true. They would lose their monopoly for sure and very likely lose a lot of customers if they kept raising rates at the clip they've been raising them: Here is a clue to the Arkansas problem â and the national one, too. From 2000 to 2007, the median earnings of Arkansas workers rose only 12 percent, from $20,328 to $22,692. Health insurance premiums for the average working Arkansas family rose over the same period by 66 percent. ------------- Party of the Dumb continues on sending the country into the ground; that is if you want healthcare companies at all. I prefer to rid the world of these things and let evolution and biology take its course and let the weak go die in a corner.
I recently developed a high fever and went into the emergency room. They checked for swine flu and then put me on anti biotics. Other than that, they did absolutely nothing, other than check in on me, for two full days. The bill for two bags of anti biotics and one swine flu test.......$8000. DRs are the reason the economy tanked.....the rest is just static. This is in addition to te fact that every DR I have seen in the last ten years has been wrong in how they treated me.....they are worse than tobacco company lawyers.
It's called capitalism. I'll have to think of a warning label for this concept the way I give idiot presidents their proper titles. Senate Panel Hears of Health Insurers' Wrongs Health insurers have forced consumers to pay billions of dollars in medical bills that the insurers themselves should have paid, according to a report released today by the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee. The report was part of a multi-pronged assault on the credibility of private insurers by Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.). It came at a time when Rockefeller, President Obama and others are seeking to offer a public alternative to private health plans as part of broad health reform legislation. Health insurers are doing everything they can to block the public option. At a committee hearing today, three health care specialists testified that insurers go to great lengths to avoid responsibility for sick people, use deliberately incomprehensible documents to mislead consumers about their benefits, and sell "junk" policies that fail to cover needed care. Rockefeller said he was exploring "why consumers get such a raw deal from their insurance companies." The star witness at the hearing was a former public relations executive for major health insurers whose testimony boiled down to this: Don't trust the insurers. --------- NPR is playing the name game with lobbyists : Name that Lobbyist