Health Insurance Industry: “Competition?!?!?!?!?!?? NOOOOO!!!!!!!”

Our Free Market Conservatives have suddenly unlearned all of their favorite slogans from the last few decades. “Competition.” “Let the marketplace sort everything out.” “A private company will ALWAYS be more efficient than a bunch of bureaucrats who can’t get fired.”

OK then, let’s put these theories to the test. Let’s have a good old-fashioned rough-and-tumble marketplace competition: the ultra-powerful multi-billion-dollar health insurance industry versus those lazy inept government bureaucrats. Let’s give consumers a choice. Isn’t that how the “Free Market” is supposed to work?

HMOs can keep doing what they're doing, and their only “competition” will be against a bunch of inefficient bumbling paper-shuffling bureaucrats. No contest. Piece of cake! Right???

Uh oh. That “thwoopft” sound you just heard was thousands of HMO executives pulling their heads in like a bunch of turtles. And now they’re all cowering in the fetal position.

If Obama’s health reform program includes a government-run insurance plan, the party’s over for HMOs. Gouging, denying coverage, dropping longtime customers like a hot potato as soon as they file a claim — up in smoke.

Of course they can’t word it that way — not in public anyway. So the health insurance industry has instructed their prostitutes in Congress to frame the issue. Spin the hell out of it. Hardworking dedicated entrepreneurs — the backbone of this great nation — will be driven out of business by our powergrabbing socialist government. They’ll have the rug pulled out from under them. The health insurance industry will be RUINED.

Grandpa Blueshield founded his company on a shoestring. He pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and after decades of backbreaking work, he turned his small family business into a great empire. And now his labor of love is about to be plundered and destroyed by faceless government bureaucrats.

Karen Ignagni, one of the health insurance industry’s most powerful lobbyists, claims that if a government-run insurance plan sets premiums “too low,” the private market will be “unable” to compete and they’ll go out of business. So what’s your point?

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said: “The bottom line is that a government-run insurance program is the first step toward a national single-payer system.” And……….?????!?!?!?!?????

If a government-run health insurance plan sets premiums and payments “too low” and doesn’t yank the rug out from under its customers, the private health insurance industry will adapt. Either that or they’ll go under. That’s the “Free Market” in action.

FedEx and UPS haven’t been driven out of business by the Post Office. There are thousands of private schools that don’t seem to be jeopardized by our public school system.

If or when a government health insurance plan gets established, private insurance companies will adapt and compete and do whatever it takes to survive. Or they’ll go the way of the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon.

cross-posted at Bring It On!