Good piece in the WSJ detailing a recent PriceWaterhouseCoopers report showing that universal health care may have significant, positive implications for...the health care industry. Which has long been obvious. If an expansion of access is done through private insurance, that's 45 million more individuals purchasing coverage, and many millions more who'll be able to afford prescription drugs, regular treatment, and all the rest. We are, in effect, subsidizing the poor to become health care customers.
Industry has some concerns, however. Mainly, the public insurer being proposed by Democrats. They don't like that idea, and for all the obvious reasons. For all the scary stories about the dystopian hell that awaits us if we nationalize the health care system, the private insurers seem surprisingly loathe to compete against an insurer uninterested in turning a profit. It's almost as if they don't really think that Americans will hate public insurance! What're the odds!?
My hunch, sadly, is that they'll get their way on this. Barring a remarkable Democratic year, or the Democrats showing enough stones to ram this through the Budget Reconciliation process (where it only needs 50 votes), the public insurer may well get bargained away in return for a couple key Republican supporters. It'll be a shame if that happens, as the public insurer will be good for cost control and a damn useful experiment, but the Republicans -- and their corporate backers -- really are worried that if Americans have a choice, they'll choose government. And that's the sort of ideologically transformative occurrence they can't allow to happen.
