It's time to end for-profit health insurance in the USA. The report issued today by Health Care for America Now illustrates why.
The very concept of consumer-level insurance - sharing risk across a large group of people - is by definition socialistic. We can stipulate that right off the bat. So why is health insurance a for-profit enterprise in this country? This is a perversion that we need to correct. There is no practical reason that health insurance coverage ought to be provided by the private sector at a cost to the public of many billions of dollars per year over and above the actual dollars paid for health care.
If we're not ready to recognize in this country what the rest of the industrialized world did long ago - that for-profit health care is obscene - let us at least go this far, and stop wasting colossal amounts of money on the overhead of private health insurance.
Single-payer now - nationalize it!