Regulating Private Health Insurance

I need some clarifications Mr. President.  First, you want the health insurance companies to accept everyone regardless of any pre-existing conditions.  Second, once they are insured, they cannot be denied coverage for anything and lastly the policy must include all wellness benefits like office visits and regularly scheduled exams and tests. 

Ok, lets just say for a minute that all these regulations of the private health insurance industry can be accomplished.  Here are my questions:

Why would you still need a “Public Plan” down the road?  Wouldn’t you have regulated the private insurance to the point where it would already be a ”Public Plan”?

Why would you want to create a whole new layer of administrative costs with a new government bureaucracy when there are 1500 private health insurance companies with administrative systems already in place?

But President Obama says we need to create competition with a “Public Plan” to force the priviate insurance companies to lower costs. 

Granted there maybe plenty of fat in some of these private insurance companies but a premium structure will still have to be established in order to have enough profits to support the millions of jobs in this industry. 

So in your competition idea Mr. President, what do you think is going to happen when the government creates a “Public Plan” with lower premiums?  

What will happen is that millions of employers and individuals will flock to the “Public Plan”.  There will be mass consolidation in the private health insurance industry to try to compete which will mean hundreds of thousands of more jobs will be lost. 

People that support this “Public Plan” idea can rationalize all they want but I don’t think there is any doubt that what I just described would eventually happen and our country would end up with a “Single Payer” government plan.  Millions of people in the U.S. want this to happen but do we want to create this much angst and will we ever be able to afford it.

The first step in this whole debate has to be the realization that we must decide on one or the other in my opinion.  Either a highly regulated and subsidized private insurance system or a single payer government system.  I don’t think the two can ever be compatible. 

I wish the President would live up to what he said himself last night, “I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch. “ 

I agree wholeheartedly.  Lets regulate the health insurance industry much like we did with utilities.  Regulate premium charges and profits with Public Service Commissions.  Keep all the present insurance companies and their employees in place.  Who knows, maybe such a system could even produce more jobs eventually. 

Seems to me this is the direction we need to go if all of us are convinced that health care is a right that must be provided for all its citizens.