Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and many other liberals like to tear into health insurers for their "obscene profits." Indeed, one of the ways Obama intends to reduce health care costs for all Americans would be to cut into the enormously greedy profits of health insurers.

But health insurers in this country, like Gimbels before them, barely make enough profits to keep themselves in business (1). When Obama is given the green light to cut into profits, he will hardly find any fat. But liberals need the lie that health insurers are making too much money as the main reason for the public option: that it would force private insurers to trim profits.

Too bad for that: health insurers posted a 2.2 percent profit margin last year, one of the lowest of all industries in this country. So even if Obama trimmed half the profits, it seems hardly worth it, turning our system into socialized medicine to save 1.1 percent.

There are ways to improve health care in this country, but they all involve LESS government not MORE:

• Allow individuals, not just companies, to deduct the cost of their health care from their taxes. Unions don't like this because they don't want to make it easy for employees to buy insurance. Having insurance that is not tied to an employer will make it easier to change jobs and to retain the coverage one has.


• Stop government mandates that force companies to offer things we don't need. Allow me the option to buy insurance without pregnancy care or other things I do not want (2).


• Allow us to buy health insurance from other states. If I can buy wine cheaper from another state, why can't I do the same with health insurance?


• Remove government price controls on the health care industry. The Soviets learned long ago that price controls only make things more expensive.


• Get rid of the FDA. They only help drug companies and certainly do not protect individuals.


• Liberal idiots complain that no one should be making money on health care. I ask, then why should government.? Let us stop taxing all health care. Doctors, private hospitals, health care insurers should not have to pay taxes. That will lower health care costs more than any single thing the government can do.


• Medical Malpractice reform. Liberals claim that health care insurers make too much money yet seem to turn a blind eye when looking at the billions that malpractice attorneys make.


• Current government policies discourage a free market in a retail-oriented health-care market in which insurance guards against large, catastrophic expenses instead of prepaid health care. People really only need major medical, not insurance that pays for every single minor piddling thing like coughs due to cold.

These are only a few suggestions, there are hundreds more, all of which require the government to stop meddling in health care. According to Workingclass Conservative there are "about 7 million Americans uninsured... That is hardly a crisis, certainly not grounds for the federal government to look to seek greater control over 1/6th of the American economy."

Blogger Wise Conservatism gives us more than enough Reasons why Government cannot run Health care.

A tip of the turban to A Good Choice...: Ten Ways to Improve Healthcare in America.

ENDNOTES

(1):

FoxNews, 26 Oct 2009, FACT CHECK: Health insurer profits not so fat

In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making "immoral" and "obscene" returns while "the bodies pile up."

Ledgers tell a different reality. Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That's anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.

Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure.

...

Insurers are an expedient target for leaders who want a government-run plan in the marketplace. Such a public option would force private insurers to trim profits and restrain premiums to compete, the argument goes. This would "keep insurance companies honest," says President Barack Obama.

(2):

Ludwig von Mises Institute, American Healthcare Fascialism

Layers of regulation plague every aspect of medical care and health insurance in America. In the health-insurance industry, for instance, each state imposes dozens of regulatory mandates on health insurers, requiring them to include coverage of everything from massage therapy to hair implants. The reason for mandates is that the message-therapy and hair-implant industries (and many others) hire lobbyists to bribe state legislators to require insurers to cover their particular practice if they want to sell insurance within a state. Among the states with the largest number of mandates as of 2009 are Rhode Island (70), Minnesota (68), Maryland (66), New Mexico (57), and Maine (55). Idaho has the fewest mandates (13), followed by Alabama (21), Utah (23), and Hawaii (24).

Each mandate increases the cost of health insurance and probably increases the typical health-insurance policy by hundreds, or thousands, of dollars yearly.