Molly,
Yes and I agree. Health care is different it is essential to the well-being of our citizens and therefore our society at large. I agree that it should be affordable and accessable to ALL CITIZENS, not just those fianancially well off enough to afford it.
What I don't get is the government sees no problem controlling the cost of the actual service (i.e how much they will pay for a chole, or cardiac cath, x-ray, a day in-patient, etc.). I actually had one staffer tell me that they have a big book that they look up what the profit margin of the hospitals is, and they have determined they (hospitals) are making money and that if they don't pay their workers enough to keep them (nursing shortage) that's their problem. And they apparently believe market forces will prevail to correct the problem.
Why then is there suddenly this attitude of 'hands off we can't tell insurance companies how much profit margin they can have. What their CEO's take out of the system isn't our (the governments) business.' No one in the government says, well if they can pay their executives that kind of money maybe they're charging to much for their service, let's put a cap on what they can charge for insurance. That for some reason is taboo.
Now that I think about it, isn't that exactly what happen with medicare HMO's? And isn't that exactly why the insurance companies started dumping Medicare patients, because Medicare wasn't giving them a big enough profit margin. And yet when the doctors and hospitals complain about the same thing they are labeled greedy and blamed as the reason why health care costs are rising.
No one seems to care that millions are raked out of the system by the CEO's of these insurance companies. Why? In the big picture is it really just seen as insignificant?
