No one likes insurance companies (trying to get them to pay a claim is like wrenching a bone out of a dog’s clenched teeth), and now we have another reason to hold them in low regard. The biggest advocate for blowing another $1 trillion hole in the federal budget is the health insurance lobby.
The giant insurance companies — including UnitedHealth, Blue Cross, and Humana — are leading what Capitol Hill sources describe as “an unprecedented lobbying blitz to restore hundreds of billions in taxpayer-funded Obamacare and Medicare Advantage subsidies.”
This isn’t to help seniors or poor households. Brian Blase, a longtime healthcare expert who worked in the Trump White House, calculates that most of the reimbursement money wouldn’t financially benefit patients. The premium subsidies would mostly go straight into the bank accounts of the mega insurers.
The dirty little secret of the healthcare system since Obamacare was enacted back in 2010 is that the big jackpot winner has been the insurance industry. Their stock has risen roughly four times faster than average for the stock indexes.
By some estimates restoring expanded taxpayer subsidies (that were trimmed in the tax bill passed in July) are worth $30 to $50 billion to the insurance lobby.
This raises the question of whether most health insurance spending is really needed at all. If every American simply had a catastrophic coverage plan that would avoid families going bankrupt due to cancer or a terrible accident, we could simply pay our routine health bills the way we pay for rent or groceries — and then cut out the insurance middleman.
This would immediately bring a stop to the stampeding costs of health care services, because patients would be selective about what services cost while doctors and hospitals could no longer pass costs on to third party insurers.
Patients would shop around for the lowest prices, and health insurance would be like home fire insurance. There to aid families in an emergency.
Instead the insurance companies are adding hundreds of billions of extraneous profits out of the healthcare system because Americans are over-insured.
Ironically, when Obamacare was originally hatched back in 2010, opponents, including many of your loyal UP editors, warned that the endgame was a single-payer government-run system that eliminates the private insurance industry middleman. That’s exactly the outcome the $3 trillion health care system is barreling toward.
The irony here is that sooner, rather than later, the Bernie Sanders Democrats are going to make their case that the vulturous insurance lobby is an unnecessary trillion-dollar expense to the health care chain.
In other words, the duplicitous insurers have gotten so greedy and ungodly rich off of federal handouts, they are making healthcare way too expensive and unaffordable for everyone else.
If Democrats and Republicans can agree on anything, it’s that all Americans would be richer and healthier without this health insurance scam.
Stephen Moore is a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and a former Trump senior economic advisor.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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