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by Alliance for Democracy

Federal lawmakers have squandered much of the autumn debating how best to provide private health insurance to approximately fifty million uninsured Americans. Guaranteeing healthcare for these individuals is certainly a moral imperative. However, relying on private insurers to serve these individuals is about as prudent as hiring a band of pedophiles to run a national childcare program. Anyone who has worked as a healthcare provider long enough, and has been paying attention, eventually comes to recognize private health "insurance" is a large-scale criminal endeavor--part Ponzi scheme, part extortion racket--that consistently exploits patients at their most vulnerable moments. In short, private health insurance is the sort of predatory enterprise, like payday lending and loan-sharking, that should be criminalized. Health insurance, as the late political historian Edward Beiser pointed out in his seminal 1994 article "The Emperor's New Scrubs," is a misnomer. The principle behind traditional insurance is the distribution of risk. For example, the odds of my home burning down are quite low. The odds of any other home burning in my community are similarly low. However, the odds of some home in our community burning are reasonably high, so we all pay into a reserve fund--"fire insurance"--and whoever suffers the misfortune of a home-burning collects the pot. This "pooling of risk" is a staple of most high school economics classes. However, health "insurance" does not follow this model, because, over the course of time, nearly all of us will suffer the bodily ills that cause us to draw funds from the collective till. So what we are doing, by paying for private insurance, is having a third party manage our healthcare dollars for us until we're ready to use them. In return, this third party banks the interest and skims a profit off the top, employing an army of paper-pushing middlemen to manage our contributions. The very act of calling these healthcare middlemen "insurers"...

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