Health insurance reform starts in the lobby

I got my hair cut the other day. It’s a great haircut because my stylist took two hours to do it. Really, you should check it out.

One of the reasons I got so much extra time under the snip-snips was because my stylist was ranting at length about the evil health insurance companies that our brilliant politicians and their bang-up health care reform bill are going to protect us from. I kept trying to convince her that the drug companies are the ones that need some knuckling, not the insurance companies…and that a system that pays doctors based on the quantity of “care” (would you like 17 x-rays with your order of the super-sized blood test today, ma’am) instead of the quality (like actually healing patients) is where the spiraling costs of care are coming from.

She’s have none of it. She’s heard her propoganda well, and was in full terrier mode. They told us the insurance companies are to blame, and those bitches must be because I have to fight with them every time I need a procedure done!

There’s a great blog post from our friends at Planet Moron about all this. See, the crap-ass “compromise” health care proposals (read: gutted by industry lobbyists taking advantage of our anemic administration and brain-eating zombie congressional leadership)  currently on the table will likely fail at everything they’re trying to do, with one exception…. they’re going to give the health insurance companies such a kick up the poop chute that no amount of health care will be likely to dislodge the jackboot in their collective colon.

Now, I hate insurance companies as much as the next person.  How dare they tell me I can’t get a $10,000 MRI on my broken toe? That thing frickin hurts, man. I deserve to get whatever health care I want for it. I’m an American, dammit!

But someone has targeted them unfairly as the source of all our woes in America’s pathetic health care system.

How exactly is that? The health insurance companies already make crap for profits. At 3.5%, they do better than the average restaurant, grocery store, or struggling small business (the latter really qualifying as in need of serious health care)…and they do worse than, well, just about every other kind of business there is except for Yahoo.

Meanwhile, those parts of the health care system that really should be getting some preventative treatments lest their gluttony turn into a bad case of diabetes (drug companies) and the parts already being compensated for the wrong outcomes (doctors) are doing quite well, thank you very much.

And all that extra money they’re bathing in sure translates into powerful lobbies.

And those lobbies have co-opted the administration and congress without even having to plop down a co-payment. They’re not even giving us patients a lollipop after the rectal examination they’re forcibly administering on all of us.

Does anyone really think insurance companies are going to be more likely to approve treatments for your dear grandma once they’re forced to eliminate whatever profits they might currently be making? Do the words “managed care” ring a bell for anyone out there?

Meanwhile, in the thousand-page bureaucratnik proposal, with its 700+ pork amendments, guess who is guaranteeing themselves even more profit (drug companies) and ensuring that they’re going to continue to get paid piecemeal for every meaningless test they prescribe (doctors). That one-two knockout punch is creeping up towards being responsible for close to half of the costs of healthcare today, and are largely to blame for America having the shortest average lifespan of all G20 nations.

Yeah, that’s reform all right. The ones that determine whether you get health care at all are going to be pressured to give you even less of it, while the ones driving the spiraling costs are going to continue to drive the possibility of insurance companies being able to pay for it ever lower.

You and I, well I guess we’re going to have an easier time if we want sex-change operations, because they’re giving us dick.

But I’m always an optimist, as you know. So maybe this is a good thing. 10 years after we institute this plan, our health care system will go from ranking equally with Slovakia towards something more Zimbabwe-like. And then maybe socialized medicine (don’t call it “public option”, you pansies!) will become more attractive to the screaming hysterical fools out there that think having the government pay for a common good (like, um, its population staying alive) will realize that was the plan we should have pursued in the first place.

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