rocketpig said:
It's a fine line Obama is trying to walk and frankly, I think it's going to fail. Stop price-gouging? Then expect diminished care. More regulation? Expect companies to provide the absolute bare minimum, even more than they do now. If the going gets really rough, expect some companies to bow out of the business entirely, straining those who are left even more. It's a tough situation and there's no easy solution. I know I'll be watching intently to see how Obama deals with the situation.
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Actually the amount of people not buying health insurance is hurting people as much as the price gouging. A lot of people have dropped their health insurance because they can't afford it or think that they are healthy enough that they don't need it. That is money that is being taken out of the system that raises costs for everyone else. If everyone, including healthy people, were buying coverage, then the costs would be spread out across a more diverse and overall healthier group of individuals.
Its not necessarily that there is more regulation being advocated, but that many of the favorable regulations already in place that give an unreasonable degree of favoritism to insurance companies are going to be modified or done away with.
People automatically assume that regulations are against the companies in a sector of the market, which is blatantly untrue. There are many regulations in place that are anti-consumer and pro-health insurance provider. Regulations cut both ways, they can, and in many cases do, hurt consumers rather than the companies within that market. But for whatever reason people who are advocates of deregulation often ignore this.
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It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
