re: #123 mich-again

Washington isn’t an entity, though. Health insurance reform, even if it is deregulation, has to pass through congress. Even if you think that what we need is more privatization and less regulation— and god, no, we don’t— that’s something “Washington” has to touch.

The government manages a lot of very large scale things pretty damn well. It’s hard to compare them to any actual private enterprise, because the government tends to be larger and, in many ways, more transparent than private companies. We can examine Medicare’s fraud rate, for example, because they publish their audits and we can investigate them. We have no idea, none, what the fraud rate is at private insurance companies.

The amount of regulation that would be necessary to make the health insurance companies actually provide health insurance in a sane, reasonable fashion would be so onerous— since the free market for health insurance rewards health insurance companies that have the fewest actually sick people as customers, among other reasons— that I don’t see any compelling reason to keep the companies private.