Bernie Sanders, who gets my vote in the next Presidential race, writes:

The main reason we get such bad results is that the function of private health insurance companies is not to provide quality healthcare for all, but to make huge profits for those who own the companies. With thousands of different health benefit programs designed to maximize profits, private health insurance companies spend an incredible 30 percent of each healthcare dollar on administration and billing, exorbitant CEO compensation packages, advertising, lobbying, and campaign contributions. Public programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the department of Veterans Affairs are administered for far less.

In recent years, while we have experienced an acute shortage of primary healthcare doctors as well as nurses and dentists, we are paying for a huge increase in healthcare bureaucrats and bill collectors. Over the past three decades, the number of administrative personnel has grown by 25 times the number of physicians.

While healthcare costs are soaring, it should surprise no one that profits of private health insurance companies are more than keeping pace.

From 2003 to 2007, the combined profits of the nation’s major health insurance companies increased by 170 percent. And, while more and more Americans are losing their jobs and health insurance, the top executives in the industry are receiving lavish compensation packages.

It’s not just William McGuire, the former head of United Health, who several years ago accumulated stock options worth an estimated $1.6 billion, or Cigna CEO Edward Hanway who made more than $120 million in the past five years. The reality is that CEO compensation for the top health insurance companies now averages $14.2 million

"Health" insurance companies do not deliver health care; they deliver profits to their owners. In fact, delivering profits is the fiduciary responsibility of management to shareholders! And all other things being equal, it's always going to be more profitable to collect your money in premiums, and then never pay it out in care! For example:

The 64-year-old man with a family history of colon cancer working two jobs has insurance, but can't afford the co-pays for tests to analyze his rectal bleeding. So he says he'll wait a year until he's eligible for Medicare.

Of course, if he had a salary of $14.2 million and a history of recto-cranial inversion, there would be no problem...

So insurance companies will always try to collect and not pay out, not because they are bad people -- though plenty of the CEOs, just like the tobacco CEOs, are bad people -- but because that's how a for-profit system works.

So, when the so-called "public option" keeps for-profit insurance as part of the system:

1. Expect the health insurance companies to invest part of their profits in purchasing Congress, manipulating the press, and producing false studies, just as they are doing now, and just as the tobacco companies did for generations;

2. Expect the public option services to be framed as "welfare" and "taxes" (they already have been) and to be steadily chipped away at to prevent "unfair" competition from the government;

3. Expect the health insurance companies and the finance wing of the Democratic Party, now firmly allied, to chip away at existing government programs, like Medicare and especially Medicaid, under the rubric of "entitlement" "reform";

4. Expect the health insurance companies to turn the public option into a dumping ground for the citizens who actually need care, so they get the patients who are profitable, and the taxpayers only get the patients who are not. Again, this is what they are not only incentivized to do, but have a fiduciary duty to do.

The failure of health care reform under Clinton kept the insurance companies in business for 15 years or so. The public option is simply a softer FAIL, and will keep the the insurance companies in business for another 15 years or so. Mission accomplished!

NOTE Oh, I can't answer the question in the headline; I'm not a telepath. But I do know that anybody who does is a fool -- or exemplifies the old principle that it's impossible to get somebody to understand something when it is not in their interest to do so.