Throughout this prolonged national debate about what to do with our dysfunctional health care system, we here in Florida have heard precious little from or about the state’s dominant private health insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida (BCBSF), which covers nearly one out of three insured Floridians.
As this titanic battle appears to be heading towards a congressional climax, it’s all too easy to be swayed by both sides into seeing the Democratic reform effort led by President Obama in overly simplistic terms - good or bad, right or wrong, black or white.
But the painful, confusing realities of how America’s private health insurance system is structured, and who stands to benefit the most from different kinds of changes to that structure - those realities may be more easily understood by looking at what’s happening in the "gray zone", where the Business of health care and the Politics of health care overlap and blur together, where black and white, right and wrong and good and bad can get very hard to tell apart.
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