That was the little-noticed message from the made-for-TV spectacle that administration officials called a healthcare "game changer": In saying they can voluntarily slash $200 billion a year off the country's medical bills over the next decade and still preserve their profits, healthcare companies implicitly acknowledged they were plotting to fleece consumers and have been fleecing them for years. With that acknowledgment came the tacit admission that the industry's business is based not on respectable returns, but on grotesque profiteering and waste -- the kind that can give up $2 trillion and still guarantee huge margins.
From salon.com: Obama, the healthcare Riddler By David Sirota.
I like how David Sirota has grasped the obvious. But he does not plumb the depths of the depravity here. We have numerous HMOs, PPOs, and whatever other initials the health insurance industry can throw at us. But the free-enterprise champion always goes on about how competition provides us with the best of whatever at the lowest price possible. Where do you see any effectiveness of this philosophy at work in the health insurance industry? Where's the effect of this philosophy? Where's the efficiency that competition supposedly compels?
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