Health Care Watch: What's so great about private health insurance?

By GottaLaff

UPDATE: Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley sees a health care bill reaching Obama's desk by mid-November.

Michael Hiltzik's piece in today's L.A. Times is another good read:

[I]f the insurers have proved anything over the last 15 years as the health crisis has gathered speed like an avalanche roaring downhill, it's that they're part of the problem, not the solution.

The firms take billions of dollars out of the U.S. healthcare wallet as profits, while imposing enormous administrative costs on doctors, hospitals, employers and patients. They've introduced complexity into the system at every level. Your doctor has to fight them to get approval for the treatment he or she thinks is best for you. Your hospital has to fight them for approval for every day you're laid up. Then they have to fight them to get their bills paid, and you do too. [...]

But they're in an even better position to throttle reform. Mergers and acquisitions have turned the industry into a cartel of huge corporations. [...]

[C]onsolidation has produced functional monopolies in communities across America. [...]

Why do we tolerate this? The industry loves to promote surveys indicating that most Americans are "satisfied" with their current health insurance [...]

Yet these figures are misleading. Most people are satisfied with their current insurance because most people never have a complex encounter with the health insurance bureaucracy. [...]

Anyone whose condition is even slightly out of the ordinary knows the sinking feeling of entering health insurance hell -- pre-authorizations, denials, appeals, and days, weeks, even months wasted waiting for resolution. [...]

Meanwhile, people employed by big companies that offer a health plan are within a layoff notice of losing coverage for themselves or their families, joining America's 46 million uninsured. [...]

Have hay fever, asthma, a cholesterol pill prescription? Are you a woman of child-bearing age? You're virtually uninsurable at an affordable cost.

Even if you're accepted, your carrier reserves the right to cancel your policy retroactively if it finds that you left even a tiny condition from years back off your application.

The public option may be your lifeline -- if it's enacted. [...]

According to the Center for Public Integrity, the biggest backer of the Blue Dogs’ political action committee is the healthcare industry [...]

Then there's the advocacy group called the Campaign for an American Solution, which describes itself as "a grass-roots effort [...] [Y]ou can't get much further from the grass roots than to be a creation of the industry with the biggest stake in the debate.

After that, I need some kind of blood pressure-lowering pill... but I'm pretty sure my insurance provider would drop me if I asked for one.