Insurance Companies Have Refused to Innovate, Find a Way to Cover 30 Mil Uninsured

It is key to Republican dogma that only business, and never government, can fix society’s problems.

But one central, over-riding fact in the debate over health care always gets lost — it was lost in the 1994 debate over “Hillarycare,” and it was never addressed in the debates in 2009 and last year that resulted in the Affordable Care Act reforms.

It’s this: The huge, multi-level crisis we’re facing in health care was, in fact, created by the private health insurance companies. The failure of the private “system” that has left millions of Americans without health-care coverage is a result of policies created — not in Congress, not in an Executive Branch regulatory office — but in the executive suites of private health-insurance corporations.

Over time, these failed private-industry policies have created a pool of 30 million-plus Americans. That’s more people than the population of Australia and roughly the populations of Canada and California.

It was deliberate policy decisions made by corporate insurance executives and enacted by private insurance bureaucrats that created the system in which Americans with pre-existing conditions are denied care — a policy based on corporate greed that is found in no other country.

It was policies of private insurance companies that capped lifetime coverage.

It is insurance company bureaucrats who — right now, today — operate real “death panels” that ration care.

These and the other inefficiencies and inadequacies that have driven the quality of health care in the United States down to 37th in the world could be resolved tomorrow — not by the government, not by laws — but by these private companies themselves.

All they would have to do is change their policies to cover everyone.

Period.

If, as Republicans say, only private industry can solve problems, then why haven’t private health plans put their heads together and come up with innovative, non-governmental strategies for covering everyone and keeping costs down while still preserving their profits?

Arguably, private insurance companies have had since they killed “Hillarycare” in September 1994 — 16 years — to solve this crisis. Instead, the crisis has gotten steadily worse.

The fact is, the private insurance corporations could resolve this crisis tomorrow, if they wanted to.

What’s stopping them? Why won’t private companies fix the crisis they created?

Obviously, resolving the crisis would cut into the $200 billion annual profits of these megacorps.

In 1994, these companies “invested” in Republicans in Congress in order to kill Hillarycare and protect their profits. What they learned then was that it was easier — and cheaper — to pay the Republican Party to do their dirty work and preserve the failed but profitable system than it was to come up with a solution that fulfilled their obligation as corporate citizens to provide health care to all Americans.

In 2009, the megacorps had a golden opportunity to institute a private-insurance alternative to the Democrats’ proposals.

Instead, they chose to invest millions in manufacturing rage among tea party mobs through their Republicans astroturfers at Freedomworks, Tea Party Express and the rest.

And yet, despite the millions they spent on lies, propaganda, disinformation and spin about health-care reform, they were unable to kill the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

In the 2010 midterms, the megacorps bought and paid for a new Republican majority in the House — and thanks to Citizens United, they were able to invest millions in GOP campaigns anonymously — in order to get another bite at the apple, another chance to roll back the clock and hobble the U.S. economy with their failed but profitable “system” once again.

All that said, one thing is puzzling. It’s unclear why the insurance megacorps oppose the individual mandate — a system that would deliver 30 million new customers to them overnight, a Republican pro-business concept produced by the GOP’s Heritage Institute “think” tank and implemented in Massachusetts by GOP 2012 presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney when he was governor.

One possible clue for what they really want can be found in statements from their mouthpieces in the Republican Party, particularly Rush Limbaugh and Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have said quite plainly that they want the government to fail. Why? Because a collapse of the American government regulatory regime would pave the way for complete and total corporate hegemony.

A more benign rationale is that, like the soulless executives who ran the “too big to fail” banks during the Bush era, insurance-company executives are blinded by their own greed, and just do not give a damn about the health and welfare of Americans who cannot afford to buy their products.

Under our regulatory capitalist system, when private companies fail to meet their obligations, it is the responsibility of the government to step in. That’s what happened here.

The bottom line is that, if the insurance megacorps and their tea party Republican lapdogs don’t like “Obamacare,” they only have themselves to blame for it.