[according to the health insurance industry, via Grassley. Here's hoping they're right.]
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Two-Key-Health-Care-Number-by-Robert-Parry-090611-519.html
June 11, 2009
consortiumnews.com
Two Key Health-Care Numbers
by Robert Parry
To understand the financial stakes involved in the battle over U.S.
health-care reform, it's useful to keep two numbers in mind: 50
million and 119 million.
The first number is the approximate total of Americans without
health insurance, a new market that the private health insurance
industry is salivating to get its hands on. The industry's hope is
that the government will mandate that those Americans sign up for
private insurance and offer subsidies for those who can't afford to
pay the premiums.
Fifty million new customers and government largesse to help pay the
bills would be a huge windfall for the insurance industry, which
otherwise faces a decline in its market because Baby Boomers are
reaching the age to qualify for Medicare and because rising
unemployment is draining the pool of Americans who have insurance
through their employers.
So, as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. noted, the 50
million potential customers explain why the insurance companies have
been so eager to sit down at the reform table.
"Their public-spiritedness reflects enlightened self-interest,"
Dionne wrote. "Health-care reform could bail out these interests by
adding the currently uninsured--fast approaching 50 million
people--to their customer base and by preventing more individuals
and employers from dropping insurance altogether."
But Dionne and other mainstream analysts miss the significance of
the other number--119 million--and why it is even a more powerful
incentive for private insurers to have the ear of key members of
Congress and White House insiders. It is the figure that the
industry and its backers cite as the potential exodus of disaffected
customers to a public health insurance option.
The industry's curious argument is that so many Americans would bolt
to a government-run program that the option simply can't be allowed.
"As many as 119 million Americans would shift from private coverage
to the government plan," one of the industry's chief protectors,
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote in a column for Politico.com.
<snip>
As Grassley--the top Republican on the Senate Finance
Committee--noted in his column, "As many as 119 million Americans
would shift from private coverage to the government plan," putting
"America on the path toward a completely government-run health care
system. Eventually, the government plan would overtake the entire
market."
While many Americans might say private industry brought that
prospect on itself with its high-handed treatment of so many
patients when they are most in need--when they are beset with
serious illnesses--Grassley and other industry defenders see the
solution as simply to exclude the public option.
Yet, as these industry defenders in Congress would strip out the
public option, they appear to favor including a government mandate
that would compel Americans--under some penalty of law==to obtain
private insurance coverage either individually or through their
employers (with the help of government subsidies if necessary).
That, of course, would be the ideal course for the industry, killing
the public option--thus keeping the 119 million potential defectors
--and forcing another 50 million Americans to sign up whether they
want to or not. A win-win.
<end excerpt>
Full at: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Two-Key-Health-Care-Number-by-Robert-Parry-090611-519.html
Michael