The health insurance parasites don't need to be "nudged" -- they need to be beaten down with a very large bat. Clark Newhall:

Don McCanne, the web editor of the Physicians for a National Health Plan, commented on a recent report released by the Congressional Budget Office discussing the current proposals for "building on our pressent system" as Obama phrases it. He points out that without a single payer system, any 'reform' will inevitably cost more money and deliver poorer quality than we already suffer. In other words, the current system cannot be fixed or 'reformed', no matter how many mandates or how many subsidies are legislated. The risk pool is too small, the incentives for middleman profit are too great, the administrative burdens of underwriting and selling are too pervasive---for profit health insurance companies must be relegated to the past, just like for-profit fire departments, for-profit public education, for-profit police departments and for-profit interstate highway systems. A public utility must operate for the public benefit, not for private profit. There is no more important public utility than the American health system.

Don McCanne's Comment: Everyone who is participating in the efforts to reform health care financing in the United Sates should have a copy of this CBO report. It describes in considerable detail the various policy decisions that must be made as we approach the goal of affordable health care for everyone, but only those policies that would apply to a multi-payer system of private and public programs. What is clear is that each policy decision under this scenario increases the administrative complexities of the financing system, and that the inevitable tradeoffs that must be made can only result in compromises that cause us to fall short on our goals of universality, equity, efficiency, quality, access, and affordability. Once the decision is made that we must build on our current system, there is no possible way to avoid spending more money for reform that would fall so short of a high-performance system.

Bingo!

NOTE Via DCBlogger.