Yup, thirty cents on every health care dollar, that’s what we pay health insurance companies. Think about that…and then ask yourself what you get for that thirty cents? We pay real estate agents a percentage because they know the business and help us buy our homes. We pay retailers a percentage because they house the goods we buy until we go to the store to get them. But health insurance companies? What they literally do is ration the care we receive, and obviously they ditch the customers who will cost them money. Makes perfect sense for car insurance, lower rates for better drivers who pose less risk, but health? What we literally do is pay heath insurance corporations thirty cents on the dollar to decide who among us deserves, or is entitled to, health care. They then use that thirty cents to administer that gruesome function, and to advertise endlessly back at us about how much they care- and to lobby our government to avoid any regulation or oversight and to ensure their continued profitability.

Can you blame them? If someone came to you with a business proposition to start a health insurance business, wouldn’t it make perfect sense in the business plan to maximize profits by taking in as much money as possible while laying out as little as you can? Wouldn’t you obviously try to winnow down your customer base to the healthiest people possible until you can unload them onto Medicare to absorb the real costly care?

This is the core problem with this whole health care debate that no one wants to face up to. If health is a business, run by insurance companies, then of course they are going to focus on profits- and do as little as they can for as much as they can charge. Don’t kid yourself about legislation to avoid it, they are always going to find ways to disqualify and dump people who need health care services, despite the Baucus Bill buy off of providing millions of new paying customers paid for by the taxpayers, because that’s how corporate business works. That’s not hyperbole, that’s just literal fact- corporations exist to maximize profits for shareholders. As a shareholder, would you want it any different? If you were a shareholder in a food company would you want your share value to go down because the company was giving away food to the hungry?

A public plan doesn’t have to advertise or lobby. It doesn’t have to pay anywhere near the administrative overhead of corporate insurance. And, like paving roads or providing police, it doesn’t have to make a profit for investors. Does anyone really think that a government run system- Medicare for all- would really be more draconian than corporate, profit-driven “insurance?” Seriously? How many Medicare recipients get letters in the mail telling them they are no longer covered? That would be zero.

The real hard fact here- like it or not- is that if we don’t get a public option- a real one- health care costs will strangle our economy and millions of us will find our insurance unattainable. A public option is not going to end our heath care problems by any means- we are still a fat people who avoid exercise and stuff unimaginable garbage into our faces until we can only fit into sweat pants and blankets with arms and we spend millions on antacid products to help our stomachs cope with the toxic shit we load into them. We need to change our behavior and that’s not going to happen anytime soon, but if we don’t start getting people covered so they can get early preventative care- and stop paying thirty cents on the health care dollar for which we get no value- we really will have a catastrophe befall us all and we will all look back at this time and wonder what the hell we were thinking.