There will never be true health care reform in this country until the insurance industry can be downsized to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub. Nor can the obscene profits drawn by the pharmaceutical industry ever be corralled unless their research and marketing branches are separated or hobbled. I submit a bunch of modest proposals toward those ends. (Check out Navy Blue Wife’s post on 16 Aug 2009, a fantastic diary that got few hits).
- End the anti-trust exemption of the insurance industry. Insurance and major league baseball do not come under scrutiny of any government regulatory agency. I can live with baseball’s exemption. In 2007, after the Katrina disaster, when the industry refused to pay claims to people who owned valid policies, Sen. Leahy (D-VT) introduced S1, which would have lifted their anti-trust exemption. It never made it out of committee. Contact your congress critters and recommend the re-introduction of this bill in both houses that would lift the anti-trust exemption for the entire insurance industry. This is a nuclear option. They fear this more than anything, because it will prevent them from manipulating policy rates across state lines and open their books to government auditors.
- For the pharmaceutical industry, ban all television and radio advertising of prescription and non-prescription drugs. Contrary to their propaganda, the bulk of their money is spent not on research, but on marketing their snake oil placebos over the airwaves, and bribing physicians with paid trips, "consulting" fees, and "free" samples. Once the advertising stops, patients will not be clamoring for the newest blockbuster drug.
- For an added hit to pharma, require them to pay substantial royalties to the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and any federal agencies that paid for research, as cited in scientific bibliographies, that led to the development of any new (or old) drug. For decades, I worked in the biology department at a major urban research university, and saw biology, chemistry, biochemistry, and biophysics graduate students laboring for long hours that provided the basic scientific research that underlies the entire drug industry. That debt should be repaid by these pharmaceutical parasites, who can cherry-pick this entire research database, funded by the American taxpayer, without paying anything back.
This is where the battle should be fought, people. It can only strengthen the public option model.