You know the insurance companies are nervous about health care reform when their pet politicians make perfectly contradictory arguments in the same New York Times article
Yet Sens. Michael Enzi (R-WY) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) did just that in today's times.
With the village idiots having already ruled single payer politically non-viable, the Chamber and the GOP are predictably attacking the best feature of the Democratic proposals -- extension of Medicare as a competitive alternative to private insurance.
This proposal would force the insanely inefficient private insurance industry to compete with the much more efficient public sector. A really good idea if it could be pulled off. Done successfully it could both make the case for and actually move us toward a single payer system.
Medicare is just simply better at insuring people that the big HMOs are, delivering a lot more care for a lot less money, for lots of reasons. The most important reason is that the insurance industry skims about 15-25 cents on every dollar for overhead and profit, while Medicare takes three pennies, and spends the rest on actual health care. This efficiency gap makes sense when you consider that profit-making insurance companies make money by NOT giving their subscribers health care, hence the infuriatingly complex rules and the host of bureaucrats whose job it is to tell you "no."
Progressives fear that the legislative process won't ever result in a true competition between public and private plans. A legitimate fear given who funds Congress. But if such an outcome did happen, it would wipe out the private insurers. So having already won a huge ideological victory, now they're going after the only truly progressive aspect of the Obama proposal.
But the talking point machine keeps burping. In today's nyt, Enzi and Snowe make 180 degree contradictory arguments about why this is a terrible idea:
"Forcing private plans to compete with a public program like Medicare, with its price controls and ability to shift costs to private payers, will inevitably doom true competition and could ultimately lead to a single-payer, government-run health care program," said Senator Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, the senior Republican on the committee.
Gee that sounds bad. But wait, Olympia Snowe is worried that the private sector will shift costs to the public sector:
Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, a moderate Republican, shares some of that concern. "Creation of a government plan is no panacea," she said, and "could disproportionately shift costs from private plans to the public."
Gee, that's pretty bad too. Well, which is it guys? Would Stalinist Medicare cheat by unfairly shifting costs to the valiant but beleaguered private sector, thereby undermining truth, justice and the free market way? Or would the evil private insurers sneakily shift costs to bumbling, incompetent government, bloating the really bad budget deficit?
Prediction: The GOP will pursue both lines of attack for months, even though they are fundamentally contradictory, and the MSM won't notice. Hell, they'll distill both into a single talking point.
Off we go!